University of Delaware historian David Suisman is known for his research on music and capitalism, particularly his excellent book Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard UP, 2009), which won numerous awards and accolades. Suisman’s new book, Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers (U Chicago Press, 2024), brings that same erudition to the subject of music in the military. It is the most comprehensive look at military music to date, full of fascinating historical anecdotes and insights on what music does for military states and their soldiers. Our conversation explores music as a martial technology, used for purposes of morale, discipline, indoctrination, entertainment, emotional relief, psychological warfare, and torture.

In the public episode David and I talk about the military’s use of music from the Civil War through World War Two. Our Patrons will also hear David’s critique of how we think about music in the Vietnam War–he says Hollywood has completely misinformed us on the role of music in that conflict. We’ll also talk about the iPod and our more recent conflicts in the Middle East, and hear a detailed discussion of David’s research and writing methods, plus his reading and listening recommendations. 

If you’re not a Patron, you can hear the full version, plus all of our other bonus content for just a few bucks a month–sign up at Patreon.com/phantompower. 

00:00 Introduction

04:20 The US Military’s Investment in Music

05:30 Music’s Role in Soldier Training and Discipline

12:32 The Evolution of Military Cadences

23:22 The Civil War: A Turning Point for Military Music

28:21 Forgotten Brass Instruments of the Union Army

29:38 The Role of Drummer Boys in the Civil War

33:32 Music and Morale in World War I

35:48 Group Singing and Community Singing Movement

37:28 The YMCA’s Role in Soldier Recreation

38:41 Racial Dynamics and Minstrel Shows in Military Music

41:47 Music Consumption and the Military in World War II

45:27 The USO and Live Entertainment for Troops

49:56 Vietnam War: Challenging Musical Myths

50:26 Conclusion and Call to Support the Podcast

​[00:00:00] 

David Suisman: I describe music as functioning in some ways as a lubricant in the American War machine.

It makes the machine function or allows the machine to function. It enables the machine to function. 

Introduction: This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a podcast about sound. I’m Mack Hagood. I just noticed that this month makes seven years that we’ve been doing this podcast, which feels like a pretty nice milestone. And in that time, we’ve really tried to keep the focus on sound as opposed to music.

There are a lot of fantastic podcasts about music, not nearly as many taking a really deeply nerdy approach to [00:01:00] questions about sound. And so that’s been our lane. That said, no one has managed to build a wall or police the border between sound and music. It’s a pretty fuzzy boundary and we’ve definitely spent a lot of episodes exploring that fuzzy boundary between the two.

And I guess the reason I bring this up is that this season has actually been Pretty musical so far. Our first episode this season was with Eric Salvaggio. We were talking about AI and its implications for music and then our second episode, with Liz Pelley, looked into the effects of Spotify on how we listen to music.

So two shows about how new sound technologies are reshaping music. Today’s show puts a slightly different spin on the relationship between music and technology. Today, we’re looking at music as a technology. A technology of war. My guest today is [00:02:00] University of Delaware historian, David Suisman. David is probably best known for his research on the history of music and capitalism.

Especially his excellent book, “Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music” that’s probably his best known work. Now, he’s bringing that same kind of erudition to the subject of music in the military. His new book is called Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers.

Long time listeners will know that I sometimes get a little cranky about music scholars and media scholars and the ways that we often focus on the kind of content that we like. We get a little fannish, we want to think about things like music as a force of self expression and political liberation.

Of course, music can be those things, but music can also be a technology of domination, of indoctrination, of disciplinarity, even [00:03:00] torture. And David Suisman’s “Instrument of War” is the most comprehensive look at military music that I’m aware of. If the subject matter sounds a bit grim, you’ll be happy to hear that this book is full of fascinating historical anecdotes. And in the public episode of this show, David and I are going to talk about the military’s use of music from the civil war all the way through World War II.

Our patrons will also hear David’s critique of how we think about music in the Vietnam War. He says that Hollywood has completely misinformed us on the way music worked in that war. We’ll also talk about the iPod and our more recent conflicts in the Middle East and hear a detailed discussion of David’s research and writing methods, plus his reading and listening recommendations.

If you’re not a patron, you can hear all of that material plus all of our other bonus content for just a few bucks a month. Sign up at [00:04:00] patreon.com/phantompower Okay, so without further ado, here’s my interview with historian David Suisman. 

David, welcome to the show. 

David Suisman: Thank you Mack. It’s great to be here.

Mack Hagood: Your opening sentence concerns a rather staggering figure about the United States military budget. Could you maybe tell us about that. 

David Suisman: It stopped me dead in my tracks when I found this little factoid in the course of my research. And that is that in 2015, 10 years ago, the US Congress allocated some $437 million to music by military bands and not just a raw number, but that was about three times the size of the entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Just let that sink in for a second. Like the government was spending almost three times as much on military music as all other support [00:05:00] for the arts combined. 

That really knocked me out.

Mack Hagood: It’s really incredible, and I love this as a strategy for opening a book because the number just speaks for itself, right? It boldly proclaims the stakes of the book for one thing, right? If music wasn’t perceived as deadly serious by the Pentagon, they really wouldn’t be spending this kind of money and fighting budget hawks on this issue since the Civil War, right?

There have been skeptics about the value of music to the military. But it also signals to scholars, to music scholars, that the military should really be front and center in our research agenda as well, right? 

David Suisman: Yeah, 

Mack Hagood: Why hasn’t it been?

David Suisman: Sound studies has done a lot of really creative work. but the state has not been very present in a lot of scholars’ frameworks. And one of the things that I was seeking to do, or one of the things that I was exploring in the course of working on this whole project, was trying to understand the [00:06:00] relationship between sound and the state.

I was thinking the state is important in the construction of modern, social formation. And so what is the role of sound in it? And what is, what does sound mean for the state? These were pretty abstract questions that I didn’t know how to answer for a long time. And then I found a few different places where they were manifested, but one of them was in thinking about music in the military. That was one of the places where the military is so important to the constitution of the state and the function of the state. And sound in the form of music being so central I realized, to the military. So that’s how I came to it and why I think it makes sense for the scholarship

Mack Hagood: And there’s certainly been some good research done. I’m thinking of Suzaane Cusik’s..

David Suisman: Acoustics work 

Mack Hagood: Acoustics work on musical torture, or Martin Daughtry’s work in his book “Listening to War” but in terms of a comprehensive study [00:07:00] of how music has been used by the United States military, I’m not familiar with any other book that really does this work.

David Suisman: There is surprisingly little on music in the military that’s not about, particularly songs, when people have written about music in the military, it’s often been song focused. About song lyrics, essentially. 

And, as I’m sure we’ll talk about, my book is much broader. More capacious than that.

Mack Hagood: Well, in fact that’s really why I thought it was a good fit for a sound studies podcast like this because, you don’t really focus on musical compositions or composers. Like I was really surprised at how little oral estate John Phillips Souza gets, 

David Suisman: Of mentions, yeah. 

Mack Hagood: But instead you’re really interested in, music as a sonic technology that’s used by the military on one hand, and then also by soldiers themselves or service members themselves on the other hand 

David Suisman: Yeah that’s exactly it. I’m [00:08:00] really interested in how music itself works as a technology, not about music technologies, as we usually use the term, but how music is used as a technology by the military to advance the military’s aims in war making. And it does so in this dialectical way, it works as a top down tool of the institution.

It functions to train and condition and discipline soldiers, and then as a bottom up tool of the rank and file, to basically address their own emotional and psychic needs. And these two work in concert with one another to keep the military going. 

I describe music as functioning in some ways as a lubricant in the American War machine.

It makes the machine function or allows the machine to function. It enables the machine to function. 

So in this respect, what I was interested in doing was looking past musical compositions or composers and thinking about what music [00:09:00] does in this, very Christopher Small musicking way 

Mack Hagood: Talk a little bit about that, for those who don’t know Small’s work, that concept of musicking? 

David Suisman: Yeah, he was a musicologist who posited that. It’s more constructive to think about music as a verb than a noun. And thinking about music as process more than product, as a kind of set of relationships that exists among people. 

And those people involve performers and or composers and performers and listeners, but also musical instrument makers and music publishers.

And in this case military officials who allow for music or promote music or tolerate music in the ranks. And that they are all responsible in this sort of interconnected way, in this complex, interconnected way for the phenomenon of music, which I don’t think he says this exactly, but one of the things I derive from his work is that you can’t really think about music [00:10:00] in the abstract.

Whenever you think about music in the abstract, it’s always a kind of music in particular. 

 That particularity varies, but music is something that exists in particular times and places. And so I’m thinking about music in action like Bruno Latour did with science. 

And, thinking about particular times and places, what is music? What is musical activity?

And that’s what I sought and the way that I sought to explore music in the military, in the book.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, absolutely. I would say another touchstone is, Foucalt’s work and thinking about disciplining the soldier. You do mention Foucalt’s “Discipline and Punish” 

As I recall, it talks about soldiers quite specifically and this sort of has an argument that in the 17th century soldiers were found, right? You looked for the man with a certain kind of body, who looked like a soldier that would be an effective soldier. And then by the end of the 18th century, soldiers were something that were made. [00:11:00] You found techniques to discipline the bodies of men and turn them into, what he calls a docile body.

A body that can be made useful, a body that can be organized in space and in time. And I think you show really persuasively that music is capable of doing that kind of work, and in fact, it’s probably essential to it. 

David Suisman: Yeah, it’s been really important. And if you think about stepping back for a second, one of the things that the modern nation state does is that it goes to war with other nation states. You have imperial, inter imperial wars, but the modern nation state wages war in particular ways.

And one of the ways is that it requires the mass production of soldiers. You need big armies not just as you put it, “finding soldiers” but actually manufacturing or mass producing soldiers in large numbers to wage war against one another. And music is not the only piece of this.

That’s not an argument that the music makes war. [00:12:00] Music is war. 

It’s that music is part of this process, an essential part of this process. It’s part of how the military transforms civilians into warriors, ordinary people who would not ordinarily kill other humans. And you transform them into people who (A) are capable of killing other people and in fact do that and following orders in very strict, regimented ways.

And so music is part of that discipline. We will probably come back to talking about the phenomenon of military cadences.

The chanting and bootcamp. But this sort of sounds off one, two. The guy who makes that a kind of systematic part of boot camp of basic training was a military officer named Bernard Lentz.

And he wrote this, he wrote, basically he wrote the manual on how to train drill instructors. And he did this in the 1920s, and the manual comes out in many additions. [00:13:00] And in that, he explains that by instituting this kind of call and response exchange between soldiers and drill sergeants or drill instructors, that the soldiers would be participating in this kind of rhythmic activity.

And by chanting in the call and response exchange, they, as he puts it, would be disciplining themselves. 

And it’s like the most Foucaultian phrase. He says, “Every man becomes his own drill master.” 

And I’ve never seen any record that Foucault had any awareness of this, but it’s a very Foucaultian conceit.

Mack Hagood: And because it’s that idea that somehow the body mind of the subject, of the individual internalizes the discipline that the state wants them to enact and embody. 

David Suisman: That’s right. That’s right. It’s that internalization of the discipline in a physical and also a kind of mental or psychological way, [00:14:00] but where it deviates from a strict Foucault model is that music also does something else. And that is that it’s a really invaluable tool for soldiers to preserve their own kind of psychic autonomy. 

In the military, which is what’s sometimes called a total institution, meaning people within it control almost nothing about their lives. You think about hospitals being something similar. You don’t control what you eat, in the military, you don’t control when you sleep often, you don’t even control when you go to the bathroom.

But one of the things that soldiers can do is they can control the music in their lives. They can sing, or when they have opportunities for recreation, for relaxing, they control the music. So they have control over very little, but they do control music. And music affects people very deeply.

.Mack Hagood: I would slightly differ to say that is also Foucault, but [00:15:00] in his later period, music as a technology of the self 

David Suisman: Yes. 

Mack Hagood: Which you say.

David Suisman: Which I do discuss. Yeah. Yeah. So you’re right. It’s a different Foucault 

Mack Hagood: A different Foucault. Yeah.

The friendlier, later Foucault. But that’s really interesting because we have this top down music, that’s instituted by the state.

So we have what you call field music, right? That’s the music that sort of instills that disciplinarity into the soldiers.

David Suisman: The field music is yeah it’s the drum beats, it’s the bugle calls. 

It’s telling soldiers what to be doing when and where they’re supposed to be, what they’re supposed to be doing at different times. So that’s the field music of say the Civil War. 

Drummers and buglers are the field music. They’re not the bands. The bands are different. 

Mack Hagood: And then the bands are also top down, but they’re, those are for entertainment purposes, recruitment purposes, that sort of thing, right? 

David Suisman: Yeah, the bands do so much work. Here I’m just talking about the Civil War, but it extends beyond the Civil War. But they [00:16:00] are doing recruitment work. They’re great for military civilian relations. And then within the military, military regiments in the Civil War went to the front with dedicated military bands accompanying them.

And they would have concerts basically every night. And the purpose of this was to keep soldiers’ morale up. Soldiers engage, and this is true for any war, soldiers engage in combat. The amount of time they spend in combat is very small. Most of the time they’re spending, most of the time they’re doing really boring things.

Things that are devastatingly boring and often, suffering from incredible amounts of homesickness. 

And so this music, these concerts every night were a way of keeping soldiers more or less entertained enough so that they could keep soldiering from one day to the next. They would also sing on the march, which is serving the military’s needs, but also serving the soldiers’ emotional needs.

So it works both ways.

Mack Hagood: Yeah.

And that piece of the [00:17:00] top down and the bottom up, I really think come together during the chapter on World War II, where you write about private Willie Lee Duckworth, who was marching to these cadences that Lentz prescribed but he injected something new into them.

Can you talk about him, who he was and then how he changed what we conceive of as a military march in the United States? 

David Suisman: Yeah, and I’ll start by saying that, most people have some familiarity, even if you’ve never served in the military, people have a sense of soldiers chanting these cadences in basic training. And the practice that we often associate that with is not only the one, two sound off, three, four, et cetera, but this kind of improvisation is often humorous.

Sometimes it’s a very macabre humor. Sometimes it’s very sexist humor. 

But this kind of improvisational call and response, chanting. [00:18:00] What’s interesting is that is not a timeless practice in the military. That dates back to this guy that you mentioned private Willie Lee Duckworth in I think it’s 1944, late in World War II II when he is in training at this, camp where the guy who wrote the book on how to train soldiers,

Bernard Lentz, he’s the commanding officer of the camp, and he hears Willie Lee Duckworth allegedly improvising this kind of call and response chanting. And he sees how much it elevates the morale and the sort of energy level of the trainees 

Mack Hagood: And we’ll play a little clip of that for folks, to hear what that sounds like. But you’ll recognize it. This is what we think of now as soldiers marching. 

David Suisman: Yeah [00:19:00]  Bernard Lens, he’s the commanding officer of the camp.

David Suisman: He hears Willie Lee Duckworth and he says, this is amazing. And he says, why don’t you write a bunch of these down? And he assigns him some other officers to do this with him. And then, he institutionalized this and he systematizes it and he makes a recording of it. And then that recording is circulated among other training camps.

And very quickly it becomes institutionalized practice within the military to have this kind of improvisational culture that comes originally out of African American prison [00:20:00] songs. And so it’s moving from one disciplinary institutional setting to another, 

Mack Hagood: I think this is really important to point out because I had no idea about this, Private Duckworth was black and so he was at what? He was in a… 

David Suisman: Segregated unit. 

Mack Hagood: Segregated unit. And so Lentz hears this segregated unit doing this kind of vocal performance, right? And then so that’s, when you really think about it, just from the sound of it, from what we know about, work songs and prison songs in the history of African American music, like it’s very recognizably an African American innovation.

And yet I never really piece those two things together. 

David Suisman: Yeah, this is the hidden history of this practice that most people are aware of on some level. The songs when they were in prison were called Jodi Songs, and this was allegedly, folklorists believe because there was a [00:21:00] recurring character in these songs named Joe Joe the Grinder.

He was called in prison songs. 

And Joe the Grinder was this opportunist who would go, and while somebody was in prison Joe the grinder would go and. Steal this guy’s girl, steal this guy’s money, steal this guy’s clothes, whatever. And so Joe the grinder, becomes Jodi. 

And in the military, these are known as Jodi calls because the character of Jodi gets brought into this military practice.

These chants they’re known as Jodi’s, a recurring character in the lyrics. And many, most soldiers know these as Jodi calls, as well as calling them cadences. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah, one thing that really struck me too was that Lentz seems to have given Duckworth full credit for this. In the record that I saw Duckworth’s picture is there and everything.

David Suisman: Yeah, there are some reasons to think that this story might be a little [00:22:00] apocryphal. 

There are some people who question its complete veracity. I think certainly was involved, but there’s some question that an African American private who was improvising doing this sort of vocal improvisation during training exercises might have very possibly been a form of insubordination. 

And subject to extreme punishment, so that he would’ve been doing this without some kind of sanction is maybe open to question. So I’m not sure that the Duckworth story is, let’s say the whole story, but it is certainly the story that is enshrined in like national military lore.

Mack Hagood: Nevertheless, just, even if this is a constructed narrative of some sort, the fact that a black man was the face of this innovation, that it wasn’t just appropriated and the race of the person who created it, or the people who created it was just suppressed. You hear people in the military saying that, like in [00:23:00] terms of, equity, that sort of thing, that the military has been a trailblazer and I guess this would lend some credence to that.  

David Suisman: Okay, sure. You say it’s, you could also say it’s, an extreme form of exploitation and appropriation.

Mack Hagood: Maybe I’m being too generous. 

David Suisman: There are a number of ways of reading it. Let’s say that, 

Mack Hagood: Okay. One thing that I wanted to just put on people’s radar is that you start this history with the Civil War, so I’m just curious to know why not earlier? Why do you begin the book with the Civil War? 

David Suisman: A couple of reasons. One of them is the first, it’s the first sort of modern war, first modern war of a modern nation state. it uses all the power of the nation state to wage war. It becomes the, it’s sometimes called the first total war. 

And it involves not just armies going to battle against each one another, but mobilizing entire societies against each other.

And in the course of that music is integrated in [00:24:00] new ways that become permanent in the military. So there was music in earlier wars in the Mexican American war and the Revolutionary War, and going back to time immemorial as long as we’ve had war, we’ve had music in war.

But it becomes institutionalized in this formal way. And it does so in part because it is integrated with the modern American music industries, the ability to produce all of the brass instruments. That was required for all the military bands in the Civil War. That ability depended on having an industrial infrastructure, particularly in the north, in the Union for the Union Army to scale up production of valved brass instruments.

In the very short time during the war, the The Confederate army also had bands but their bans were fewer and smaller and dependent on imported instruments by and [00:25:00] large.

Mack Hagood: So the Civil War is the beginning of this sort of systemization of war and the industrialization of war, and it’s interesting to think about musical instruments being part of that because, as I was reading the book, I was thinking about this huge military expenditure and wondering, we know that many things we take for granted today, were

invented through the huge military expenditures of the Pentagon. So things like radar or duct tape or nuclear power, or the internet, right? It all comes from the military. So what did the military invent in terms of music and musical instruments and musical technology? 

David Suisman: Interesting. I don’t think it’s been influential in the same way as inventing the internet. But one thing is it has been responsible for this civilian military fusion. The interconnectedness of the culture industry [00:26:00] and the military has been one of the innovations of having music in the military.

It hasn’t just been self-contained. It has grown in the military through its association and cultivation by the culture industry. It has produced a lot of musicians, a lot of musicians have served in the military and gone on to illustrate careers and so it’s a sort of training ground in that sense.

It reverberates that way. But I think maybe the most concrete way is to think about the way that. Music is involved in the militarization of American culture, really beginning around the turn of the 20th century. And here we get back to Sooza and the popularity of brass bands and wind bands that spills over.

It’s a military phenomenon essentially, but that becomes American popular culture. We have it even down to today. Every football game that has a marching [00:27:00] band at halftime is evidence of this long term reverberation of the militarization of American popular culture. The degree to which people are familiar with Soozan marches even today, Stars and Stripes Forever.

Even today, this is part of the air that we breathe in American popular culture. In a lot of ways, 

Mack Hagood: Do you think it was an indirect influence on jazz too? I’m thinking about, if I remember correctly, Louis Armstrong, learned to play the horn at the Colored Waifs Home. Which had a sort of military esque band that was part of, cultivating and disciplining the young students there. 

David Suisman: Yeah, I think you could totally make that argument that the availability of brass instruments is part of this explosion of brass band music that is interconnected with the Civil War. You don’t have jazz, you don’t have early jazz especially without that instrumentation.

And the standardization that goes [00:28:00] along with musical training that’s associated with brass bands. So I think there, there’s definitely that. Jazz comes into World War I in the segregated bands of the US Army, particularly James Reese Europe’s Band, which basically brings jazz to Europe for the first time. So there are certainly those interconnections as well. I would accept that. 

Mack Hagood: I was really blown away when you were talking about the Union Army hiring all of these German immigrant instrument makers who are making these cutting edge brass instruments, and you have a list of forgotten brass instruments that was really making me laugh. I’m gonna see if I can get to the page.

I think it’s page 26. Let me see if I can even read the names of these things, because they’re very peculiar sounding. 

David Suisman: Yeah. We have a sense that we know what musical instruments encompass today, but there are so many that were popular then that have been forgotten. They exist in museums now. But [00:29:00] not much else.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, so alt horns, bass tubas,. bombardons, burdens, clavichord, cornophones, saxtubas’, and sudrophone. I love to see these instruments. Do we have any around? I wonder if we have extra 

David Suisman: They are, they’re in museums and we have pictures of them. They look like variations on instruments that we’re familiar with tubas and trombones and that sort of thing. They don’t stand out. They don’t look like Dr. Seuss type, 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. I was letting my imagination run wild there 

David Suisman: Yeah. 

Mack Hagood: The Civil War really sets the stage for the military use of music in modernity in a lot of different ways. But some of the practices would seem very strange to us. And one of them is the use of drummer boys. Can you talk about the drummer boy and who he was?

Maybe how many of them there were because he really became an [00:30:00] icon of the Civil War there. 

David Suisman: Yeah, one of the things that fascinates me about this whole project is some stuff seems really familiar and some stuff seems really foreign. And the proliferation of drummer boys in the Civil War was one of the things that seemed really foreign. There were thousands of them, and most of them, not all of them, were in fact young boys.

They were often too young to enlist in the army. There the most famous one was this guy Robert Henry Hendershot, who enlisted in the Union Army at the age of 11. He claimed to be the youngest person in the union Army, but in fact, other researchers believed that there were now drummers who were younger than him.

Maybe nine and ten years old. 

They served with military units and they were the communication system for officers telling soldiers what to do, when to do it, and where to do it. So they would say, assemble, or they would say March or they’d say, go left, or go right or start shooting or stop shooting.

And drummers and [00:31:00] buglers were audible. The reason why they did this is because they were audible over distances, and they were audible over the cacophony of combat. You could hear them. And they would be at the elbow of commanding officers. The commanding officer would say, “Do the drumbeat for march” 

Not only is the phenomenon of the drummer boy interesting. And these, I should say, became these figures in popular culture. There were songs about them, there were plays about them, there were novels about them. So they were well known at the time, and they were endeared in this kind of nostalgic way.

But the other thing that’s fascinating about them is that these drum beats that the drummer boys beat out were recognizable to all the soldiers. Part of soldiering required that they could recognize all these different drum beats, dozens of them in some cases that they would say, oh, that’s the drum beat for assemble.

That’s the drumbeat for, eat, go to sleep, whatever.

Mack Hagood: Yeah that’s fascinating. It’s reminiscent of what Jonathan Stern would call an audile technique, [00:32:00] right? Like a, a mode of listening that we get in modernity that gets very specific and detailed in a particular way. And just to think about these young boys being utilized as a communication technology is pretty fascinating.

And I think part of the setting that we need to set for people and thinking about the drummer boys’ importance is that you point out this is the first war where the amount of gun smoke generated is truly like blinding. Like you you really quite often can’t see, right? There’s, and there’s also this volume of bombardment that was unprecedented at the time as well, 

David Suisman: Yeah, to be fair, it’s the first American time. The Napoleonic Wars I think had a lot of this smoke as well. So the 19th century phenomenon of lots of smoke sounds being essential to communication. 

You couldn’t rely on visual cues. You couldn’t rely on SEMA fours or whatever, for visual cues, and that’s why the sound became so [00:33:00] important. As much as we can bore into the Civil War I don’t want listeners to get the sense that this is a Civil War book, because it’s really just the point for that. 

Mack Hagood: no, not at all. Not at all. Not at all. And in fact, I was about to jump forward and just touch on some of the other wars that you discuss. And the book. It’s not entirely centered on specific wars. It is taking a wider view, but for the purposes of this podcast, it’s an easy way to organize our discussion.

And I was really interested that by World War I, I this sort of systemization and industrialization of war have really intensified and we start to get sort of psychological conceptions of war. And so like a, a term that comes to the forefront that you mentioned earlier, was the concept of Morale you, you talk about morale as a, as an idea and how [00:34:00] music was useful to the military as they were trying to cultivate morale.

David Suisman: Morale is crucial to military planning, military management in World War I. There it rises, it doesn’t, there’s morale, people talk about morale earlier, but it becomes a really key concept in military management around World War I and morale. Funny because it encompasses different things.

It encompasses mental health, general attitudes, general like levels of happiness attitudes about the war. It doesn’t mean one specific thing, but, music Works for elevating all of them. Whatever you mean by morale, music helps it and it helps people’s mental health.

It improves their disposition about where they are and what they’re doing. It doesn’t make them love the war necessarily if they don’t want to be soldiers. But it has this kind of multi versatile, multi-function effect. And in the First World War, military managers, military, senior officials looked on [00:35:00] music as an essential sort of marshal technology There’s a general in World War I named Leonard Wood, hardcore guy. He’d been a rough rider during the Spanish American war. He was a hero of the Indian wars. And he says, he’s talking about singing here specifically. But singing was a big part of music in World War I. He says it sounds odd to the ordinary person when you tell him every soldier should be a singer because the layman cannot reconcile singing with killing.

But it is just as essential that the soldiers should know how to sing as that they should carry rifles and learn how to shoot them. 

So this is part of the idea of what an operational military includes, encompasses how it works, it has that kind of function and so morale is a big part of that.

Mack Hagood: I was really struck by the role of group singing in World War I. There you show these photographs of men singing together. Where did this phenomenon come from? 

David Suisman: It is such a singing [00:36:00] war. There has always been singing in war, but there were, I think probably if you had to say one war where there was the most singing, it probably would’ve been World War I and because, and it was because it was integrated in, there were these events called Mass Sings.

These were daily or weekly singing sessions at training camps throughout the United States preparing American soldiers for war. And they were led by these volunteer song leaders who would come and they would. Lead Marines sailors, army soldiers, whatever, in song, in large numbers.

It grows out of both the sense of what singing can do in the military, in a sense part of military history. And it grew out of the contemporary movement called the Community Singing Movement which involved a lot of large community singing as a recreational and morally uplifting activity.

The 19 tens, it was in the early first couple of decades of the 20th [00:37:00] century. There was a lot of community singing, and so this is also an outgrowth of that. And yes, these pictures are really arresting. Thousands and thousands of soldiers joining together in song.

Often in the pictures you can see soldiers holding song sheets or songbooks. US soldiers were issued song books as part of their essential equipment in World War I. This floored me to learn that, they got the rifle, they got the knapsack, they got the songbook. 

Mack Hagood: That’s amazing. And the YMCA part of this was the early days of the YMCA. Do you remember?

David Suisman: The YMCA was crucial in World War I. I. In later awards, it plays an important role too, but it’s part of this military civilian institution interchange this sort of mutually constitutive aspect of war depending on these civilian institutions. And it was the provider for the military of facilities where soldiers could go for relaxation, for recreation.

And so when [00:38:00] soldiers were not soldiering, when they were not in combat, when they were not, going through drills and they had downtime, they didn’t have yet, they didn’t have enlisted men’s clubs the way we’d have in later wars. They would go to these YMCA facilities called huts and the huts would have equipment for soldiers to write letters home. There were to be books and invariably there was musical equipment, there were pianos, and there were phonographs. 

And so the YMCA was the official designated supplier of recreation facilities for the military. And it included music in all of those facilities,

Mack Hagood: That’s fascinating. Now, it would be a glaring omission, I think, if I talked with you about the Civil War and World War I and music and not bring up, minstrel shows and just the sort of racialized dynamics of music in this era of popular music in [00:39:00] America. Could you maybe talk a little bit about race and music at that time? 

David Suisman: In the Civil War, World War I era. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah.

David Suisman: Yes, it’s complicated. There are a lot of different ways of coming at this. One of them is thinking about the roles of the African American troops. The other is thinking about blackface, minstrelsy and the imprint that had on the white troops. The songs that soldiers sang in the Civil War, for example, were a mix of kind of parlor ballads and sentimental songs, and songs that came out of the blackface minstrel tradition.

There are photographs. I have a couple in the book of soldiers involved in recreation in World War I I who put on blackface minstrel shows. 

Mack Hagood: And if I remember correctly, some of the supplies that soldiers were given were, like burnt cork and things like this to,

David Suisman: were, this was, yeah, it was part of the apparatus, if you will, of music in the military was 

supplying equipment to put on [00:40:00] shows which were often mil blackface, minstrel shows. Yeah.

Mack Hagood: and then for the African American soldiers. What was their musical experience like and was there crossover between these two groups? 

David Suisman: The US military was segregated until 1948. And so, if you’re talking about the Civil War, you’re talking about World War I, even World War II, they tended to have something, they had their own bands. 

They had their own musical cultures, their own musical traditions by and large. Their music involved the music of the Army as a whole, but it also involved its own uniqueness.

Contributions as well. So the soldiers, the colored troops of the Union Army in the Civil War, had their own. A lot of them came. A lot of them were formerly enslaved. People who brought their musical traditions, African American civilian musical traditions into the military they adapted [00:41:00] spirituals into, military songs as military songs in the Civil War in World War I, I I already mentioned James Reese Europe.

He was the leading band leader in the Ragtime New York musical world. And he becomes the leading. Band leader in the Army, and it was pretty much widely agreed upon. The African American bands in World War I were the best bands. 

 The other bands there were not the only bands.

There were a lot of bands that were not these African American bands, but they’re the ones that people talked about, and they’re the ones that most people know about today. But I, one of the things I try to show in the book is that there was a bigger culture of which they were only one part.

Mack Hagood: And so they were the ones who brought a jazz sensibility to Europe. 

David Suisman: Exactly. Exactly. 

So jumping forward to World War II, you talk about a shift that has been discussed In popular music studies, ethnomusicology, musicology, which is that people. Become [00:42:00] music consumers in the sort of, somewhere between the invention of the phonograph, And by the time of World War II, standing together with a bunch of guys and singing isn’t the predominant form of musicking anymore, right? Like where people are used to consuming music. So how did the military respond in World War II, to this new type of music listener that was their military service personnel? 

Singing doesn’t disappear. One of the things I just wanna sort of stress is that there is this trend that you’re talking about where there’s an increased amount of music consumption but singing persists up through Vietnam.

David Suisman: In Vietnam, one of the CBS news reporters who asks Marines during the Tet Offensive of 1968, “How do you enter, how do you keep your spirits up at night? And the Marine says, we play cards and sing”

And this is 1968. So [00:43:00] singing doesn’t disappear and there is both formal and informal singing in the military.

But in answer to your question the military records it, it is a whole series of records just for soldiers called V discs. And these were a mix of some military music, but a lot of popular music, many by very well known music, jazz musicians and swing musicians of the era. Some other kinds of music, some light classical too.

The military produce these records, ship them out to military units all over the world on a regular basis, and the soldiers would then play them on phonographs that the military had issued to these individual units. So this is part of keeping, keeping up with the transformation of musical practice.

In civilian life throughout the 20th century there were phonographs, there was phonograph use in World War I as well, but it became much [00:44:00] more, much broader, much more expanded and much more systematized in World War II. The military also created a worldwide radio network for the first time, the Armed Forces Radio Network.

And so soldiers in World War II listened, sat around listening to the radio and they listened to radio shows that were modeled on the music shows of the American Homefront. And so the goal of the military by World War II II was to try to create conditions that were as close to soldiers’ lives as consumers as possible.

They try to give them all the consumer comforts at least in this case, through music the oh, but just an example of how, and sometimes the line is blurred between them. So another thing that, another initiative during World War II was that the military issued these monthly circulars that were sent to soldiers called the Army Hit Kit.

Every month they would get in the mail through the postal service, the military postal service, [00:45:00] an eight page circular with the song lyrics of the, of current and recent popular songs. And sometimes those songs were the same songs that were included with the latest batch of records. 

And sometimes it was also expected that they would have the lyrics so they could sing them even without the records. So there was an expectation that there would still be singing even though there was also a lot of musical listening at the time.

Mack Hagood: Wow. Wow. And then of course we also get the in-person entertainment from the USO. Can you maybe talk about the USO as that? ’cause this was a massive initiative. First of all, we have to remember there were 16 million. People in the combat theater like that’s just an incredible number of people that you need to entertain.

And the idea that they try to entertain them, not only through media, but also in person, is just just a staggering [00:46:00] effort to, to think about. 

David Suisman: Yeah it grows out of an effort. Again, growing out of World War I, there was an effort to work with the vaudeville industry in the major impresarios in World War I to supply live entertainment vaudeville shows for soldiers in World War I and in World War I, it works but by the time you get to World War ii, ii, they’re ready. a number of organizations come together and they form what’s called the United Service Organizations to supply places where soldiers could come together and dance for forms of informal recreation. And so on. And then they would also have these live shows and they, this was a, basically a subsidiary of the USO, it’s called the Camp Shows Inc.

And this was the part of the USO that staged shows by the most famous stars for the GIS stationed all over, but also not just the most famous. Stars because as you were mentioning, there were 16 million men and women who served in the military in World War II, [00:47:00] and that required a lot of shows.

And so there was the A list, there were the top stars, the big the big stars, and then there was the B list, and then there was the C list. And they would just send out as many entertainers as they could recruit to work for the military, to entertain troops to keep their spirits up. And sometimes they were great and sometimes they were not so great, but generally the soldiers would go along with it because they were in effect captive audiences.

They didn’t have any other options for live entertainment. Even a kind of mediocre live show, was better than no live show if you’re sitting in a foxhole somewhere. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. One, one thing that I found just, I don’t know, it was a little bit difficult to come to terms with, was thinking about the USO. These sorts of clubs and canteens where you mentioned they would have dances and that there were these hostesses who were expected [00:48:00] to dance with all these servicemen. Can you talk about that role and the emotional labor that must have been involved? 

David Suisman: I can, and, but I can’t do so without calling attention to the great work of Sherry Tucker on this. Her book, dance Floor Democracy is a really brilliant, 

Exploration of this. And she talks about the canteens as these places where there was a really, a great deal of emotional labor going on.

There were supposed to be these really democratic spaces where. High ranking soldiers were dancing next to the lowest privates and so on, 

In, and they were supposed to be racially integrated. In fact, they weren’t necessarily racially integrated. And their real story is more complicated than the legend, or the lore that grows up around these canteens.

But the thinking was they were opportunities for these servicemen, or people who were about to get shipped out to dance with young women who were happy to [00:49:00] do so under very strictly supervised conditions. There was not supposed to be that, it was supposed to be just dancing. 

And they, the women who worked as hostesses generally felt like they were performing a really valuable kind of patriotic service.

They were helping to give this young man what could be. In truth, his last dance, and he is gonna give his life for the country. The least that somebody could do would be to dance for them on the dance floor. 

So this is the logic underpinning the canteens.

And it was this era, it was the swing era when there was this idea that swing was this kind of democratic force in American popular life.

Mack Hagood: Wow. It’s just, yeah, it’s really something to think about moving forward to the Vietnam War and to the US incursions into Iraq and in Afghanistan in the War on Terror. The Vietnam War has a certain kind of [00:50:00] mythology around it, as you say. What did you want to do?

Sort of do with your chapter on Vietnam. What did you want to add to the musical story? What did you maybe wanna subtract from the musical story? 

David Suisman: I wanted to overturn the musical story. I almost called the chapter on Vietnam. Almost everything you know about music in the Vietnam War is wrong. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. So break it down for us. What do we have wrong about that 

Mack Hagood: David did indeed break down the musical mythology of Vietnam for us. We also talked about headphone use as a form of self care in the War on Terror, David Suisman’s methods as a historian and a writer, his reading and listening recommendations. So much stuff. It’s like a whole Extra half hour of content.

But if you’re hearing this, it means you’re either on the public feed of the podcast or you’re watching on YouTube. And my request to you is this, please join us on the Patreon. It’s three [00:51:00] bucks a month. I fund this podcast out of pocket. I lose money on every episode I make. It would be really great if I could just break even.

But more importantly than that, I just get such a great feeling when someone joins the Patreon, because it shows me that this show is valuable enough to them that they want to support it. And I actually just did the numbers and it looks like we’ve got about between one and 2 percent of people who are going to listen to this episode who are actually subscribed to the Patreon.

If I could get that number up to 5%, I could outsource some of the technical heavy lifting. Thing that makes this show so time consuming for me. And I could possibly even do two episodes a month. So if you want to support, go to patreon.com/phantom power. And if the financial thing is not for you, you can also just join up as a free Patreon member, be part of the community.

I love that as well. Another thing you can do is just tell a friend about the [00:52:00] show. It’s been a while since I asked folks to do that, but it really would help us grow a lot. Our next show is a round table about the cassette tape with three amazing scholars of that technology and the communities that have evolved out of that technology.

We’ve got Rob Drew, Eleanor Patterson, and Andrew Simon. It’s going to be fantastic. So look for that next month. And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks. To David Suisman for being on the show, and I want to thank my assistants Nisso Sacha and Katelyn Phan for their editing assistance and transcription work.

And I want to thank Blue the Fifth for our outro music. See you next time. [00:53:00] 

The post How Music Became an Instrument of War (David Suisman) appeared first on Phantom Power.

The sound studies community is reeling from the death of Jonathan Sterne this past Thursday. Jonathan’s presence and work were–and are–incredibly influential on the intellectual and ethical commitments of our field. He was a generous mentor to so many, including me. Do you know those “WWJD?” bracelets? I’ve been wearing one in my mind for about 15 years: “What Would Jonathan Do?” In this short, impromptu episode, I share a few thoughts about what he meant to me and to sound studies. If you want to spend some time with Jonathan’s voice, we were lucky to feature him in several episodes, but our Dork-o-phonics episode, based on his book Diminished Faculties, is certainly my favorite.

The post Remembering Jonathan Sterne (1970-2025) appeared first on Phantom Power.

Liz Pelly is our foremost journalist/critic on the Spotify beat. Her byline has appeared at the Baffler, Guardian, NPR, and many other outlets. She is also an adjunct instructor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Liz is also been making the media rounds lately, talking about her new book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (One Signal Publishers).

The book is both a history of Spotify and an argument that Spotify is not, in fact, a music company, but rather an advertising company focused on manipulating user behavior to maximize time on platform. As a consequence, Spotify not only pushes musical aesthetics towards banal, “lean-back listening,” it also makes musicians themselves expendable: replaceable by ghost musicians, AI slop, and behavioral algorithms that keep people just barely engaged at the lowest cost. In this show, Liz details how platforms shape listening and music making alike. We also discuss the tension between frictionless music consumption and meaningful cultural engagement.

And remember, there’s an extended version of this interview which features a bunch of bonus material including a listener question, a deep dive into Liz’s reporting methods, and the backstory of how she got into journalism and got a major book deal, plus her book and music recommendations. It’s available to our Patrons for a mere $3 a month. Sign up at Patreon.com/phantompower.

Liz Pelly: [00:00:00] When I hear something like the founder of an AI company saying “Making music is too hard.

People don’t want to learn how to play instruments,” or even this idea that a streaming platform should help people reduce cognitive work. It’s like, that essentially means we should help people not have to think. And I think that, you know, 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. 

Liz Pelly: As critics, what we do is encourage people to think, you know, thinking and making decisions is an important part of processing life in the world and information and culture and figuring out how you actually feel about someone’s art.

Introduction:

This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom [00:01:00] Power, a podcast about sound. I’m Mack Hagood. My guest today is journalist Liz Pelly, someone I’ve been reading avidly and having my students read for almost a decade now. Pelly is our foremost journalist and critic on the Spotify beat. Her byline has appeared in the Baffler, the Guardian, NPR, and many other outlets.

She’s also an adjunct instructor at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts. Liz has been making the media rounds lately, talking about her new book Mood Machine, the Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, out on One Signal Publishers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The book is both a history of Spotify and an argument that Spotify is not in fact a music company, but rather an advertising company focused on manipulating user behavior to maximize time on platform. As a consequence, Spotify not only pushes musical aesthetics towards banal, lean back [00:02:00] listening, it also makes musicians themselves expendable, replaceable by ghost musicians, AI slop, and behavioral algorithms that keep people just barely engaged at the lowest cost.

I am super excited to have Liz on the show and get into the weeds of how platforms shape listening and music making alike.

And remember, there’s an extended version of this interview that features a bunch of bonus material, including a listener question, a deep dive into Liz’s reporting methods, and the backstory of how she got into journalism and got a major book deal. We’ll also have her book and music recommendations.

It’s available to our patrons for a mere $3 a month. Sign up at patreon. com /phantom power. All right, let’s get to it. 

All right. Liz, welcome.

Liz Pelly: Hey, thank you so much for having me.

Mack Hagood: So I [00:03:00] thought we could start off by talking about the title of your book. For those of you folks out there who aren’t familiar with your years of research on Spotify and your journalistic pieces on it, why name a book about Spotify, Mood Machine? 

Liz Pelly: That’s a great question. I think when I first started thinking about the book, I was thinking about it in two sections. Actually, the first book proposal that I wrote was a proposal for two books. One was going to be about the impact of the streaming economy on listening. And one was going to be about the impact on artists. I quickly realized that it made much more sense to just write one book, but I shifted to this idea of writing a book in two parts where the first part was going to be about how streaming had reshaped listening and the second part was going to be about the material impact on musicians. That structure didn’t quite hold, by the time I got to the final table of contents, things shifted a little bit, but [00:04:00] when I was thinking about, originally, when I was thinking about mood, to me, that word sort of evoked the way that streaming has impacted listening and the shift from albums to playlists, the championing of playlists that are mood playlists or connected to emotions in some way.

And then, when I thought about the word machine, I really thought about the relationship between, like labor and the music industry or labor and capital even. You know, I was thinking about the way 

in which the music industry squeezes musicians more and more under this model and, just the trajectory of the music business.

Obviously, a lot of this book also covers the shift from the playlist era into the era of streaming curation, being more driven by machine learning and algorithms and personalization. So there’s surely like a point of this all, or there’s a way of interpreting the title that also evokes that, but yeah, it’s really interesting.

Like, you know, when I thought of it, I was thinking a lot about the relationship between musicians and this model. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Well, I love the title and I definitely want to dig into a lot of what you just mentioned there, but I was thinking maybe we could go back to 2007. Is that when Spotify launched? 

Liz Pelly: Technically, the company was created in 2006 and it launched in its first markets in 2008. 

Mack Hagood: Okay. So back then, what was the state of the music industry? What was Spotify, the alleged solution to? What was the problem?

Liz Pelly: So this is still the era where the music industry was trying to figure out how to recover from the impact of file sharing. Around 1999 to 2001 was the time when Napster was, , according to the people in the music business, wreaking havoc on the global recorded music industry. By the time Spotify came along, the music business had already spent years and years trying to figure out solutions that would work in the digital music era, you know, also taking individual fans to court over file sharing.

The music business had tried to launch some of its own streaming services as an alternative to piracy. There’s a whole sort of, fumbled strategy, on the behalf of the major record labels and the mainstream music business trying to figure out how to solve this problem. It’s really interesting because the impacts of file sharing, I think , were and continue to be felt differently by different musicians and different corners of music.

But something else that was also going on was in the United States by the mid 2000s, the iTunes library model had taken off or taken hold a little bit more here than in other parts of [00:07:00] the world. Spotify was founded in Stockholm, Sweden by two men with backgrounds in the advertising industry, in Sweden, even by 2005, 2006, while the industry was somewhat successfully starting to figure out ways of selling digital music to consumers, piracy was stronger there.

Around that time, you still had the Pirate Bay, which is a really big cultural force in Sweden. Sweden had a pirate party. There’s a politicized element of music piracy in Sweden. And yeah, I think the founders of Spotify, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon just saw an opportunity to build on their backgrounds and add tech to try to build a product that would appeal to both consumers that loved music piracy and the music industry that was like, you know, floundering. 

Mack Hagood: You know, it’s really fascinating to think about the Sweden piece, why it pops up there specifically, there were so many American companies that [00:08:00] were trying to take a crack at this, I mean, back in the day, if you had forced me to guess, like this concept of just like streaming music, , who would, , be able to do it.

Well, I probably would have guessed something like MySpace because there were, that’s where all the indie bands were. And it just seemed like something like band camp could have happened there. But Sweden winds up being the hotbed of it. And as you say, something to do with piracy, the role piracy plays there.

And it seemed from what I gleaned from your book that partly the music labels were willing to let Sweden experiment, because they already saw it as a lost cause in terms of everyone was just pirating music. Is that right? 

Liz Pelly: Yeah, according to people who were in Sweden at the time, the music industry had started to see Sweden as a lost market, to use the quote, the phrase that came up in some of my interviews. , specifically the [00:09:00] free tier, you know, that was a period of time when the music business, , and the major labels who, , control the rights to so much of what we think of when we think of the history of recorded music, which is its own issue to unpack the major labels were really allergic to anything that had the word free in it that involved, the concept of giving music away for free or providing free access to music. In Sweden, though, which the music business saw as a sort of lost market, they were more willing to take a chance on something with a free tier.

Of course, the original Spotify model, like the original model that Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon came up with, was a product that would, It was exclusively a way of delivering content for free, supported by ads. So that was the original business model. And originally they weren’t even sure if it would just be music.

The original idea was some sort of media delivery platform that would provide access to a library of content for free, funded by [00:10:00] advertising. And Even if the, , the music business was more likely to, or more willing to allow for experimenting with this sort of free tier in Sweden.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. And I was really struck in your book by what you said a minute ago, which is that these guys weren’t interested in music per se. They were interested in some kind of streaming media content to run ads against. And so, they were an ad selling business, not a music selling business from the get go.

Liz Pelly: That was their background. Daniel Ek’s background was that he worked at an SEO firm after he graduated from high school. You know, in high school, he had applied for a job at Google and they said, try again when you have a college degree. So he built his own open source search engine.

And then he got a job at an SEO firm. And then by the time he was 22, he was the CTO of this cartoon doll gaming website for teen girls. And then it was Martin Lorentzon [00:11:00] background was in ad tech. In selling automated advertisements. 

Mack Hagood: I mean, I think this is really interesting because I think on the one hand, because They weren’t music people. They didn’t have certain attachments to music that probably allowed them to innovate in the way that they did. Right. But on the other hand, a business model that is downstream from running ads rather than downstream from how we work with music as music, You can imagine, a lot of cultural and technological effects of that. 

Liz Pelly: Totally. One of the things I write in the introduction is, you know, there’s so many different ways to understand them. The story of Spotify, the story of the streaming era. But one of them, I think, is the story of these advertising men bringing the logic of their industry to music in new ways.

And I feel like that comes up time and again. I mean, in some ways I think it could be [00:12:00] boiled down to purely just the reality that now what we have is a model that views music so much as just , a cheap content source that fuels, , this, a broader, , advertising or subscription model.

and I think one of the things that I tried to trace in the book, there’s multiple different threads running through the book, but one is sort of investigating, Different efforts on the part of Spotify to lower the cost of content, , or to, , lower the amount of money that they have to spend on the audio that circulates on their platform and allows them to sell ads and sell subscriptions.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. One interesting sort of leap that I think the company took is you talk about how, in 2012, the company had, , I think 5 million paid subscribers. And in 2017, , they had more than 60 million [00:13:00] and they were , basically in 2012, this company that had a lot of major investors, but wasn’t making any money. And, , I’m really interested in how you treat sort of that five year span, , and think about what shifts happened in the company and then what the cultural effects of those shifts have been. And I’m. Particularly interested in this because, , you were asking me online or offline what my research was about.

And I do this research into how people use sound to control their effect on things like noise canceling headphones, white noise machines, nature, sound apps. And what I was noticing around 2013 or 2014, was that it seemed to me that the streaming platforms were starting to treat music. In a very similar way, and that I was noticing that instead of organizing around genre, like they were in the music, in the record stores that I grew up going to, [00:14:00] they were really, pitching music playlists in terms of like the mood or the function that it has.

So this is music to work out by, this is music to do this, to have a dinner party with or whatever. Right. And I remember mentioning this to my friends, like in popular music studies. And I was like, and saying, this is the, they’re changing the way music is purchased basically and organized and they’re like, ah, that seems like a bit of a stretch to me. They’re like, you know, genre and cultural capital and taste making is still like the coin of the realm in popular music. , you got to remember all the editorial playlists, like rap caviar and pitchforks playlist. And they were kind of like talking me down from this. And I was like, Oh, okay.

you guys. Maybe you know better than I do. But then when I saw your articles come out in the Baffler, like the first one that came out, I don’t know if that one was called like the problem with Muzak or something, I was so psyched because [00:15:00] you were taking this premise seriously, and examining it really closely.

And so I’ve just been a super big fan of your work ever since then. And what I really like to focus on in this interview is, , we know, At least I think we know that Spotify in a lot of ways has been bad for musicians, but I would really like to talk a lot about this user experience and the ways that music’s capacities for affecting mood or shifting attention or managing attention or feelings seems to have gained precedence over music’s capacities as art or as the object of our attention that the, you know, active attention. So going back to 2012, what. Started to happen at Spotify that’s changed, that [00:16:00] gave them the insight to move in this direction. 

Liz Pelly: So something that I spent a while doing while trying to trace the specific moments of when strategy changed. I mean, I did a lot of interviews for this book. It’s interesting hearing you talk about it. Because I started covering Spotify in 2016. So it was, you know, kind of a little bit after. This moment, and a lot of my initial research was interviewing musicians and interviewing people who’ve worked at independent record labels.

And by the time I started writing about streaming and Spotify musicians and people who worked at independent labels, it had become clear to them that these types of mood playlists were having such a more dominant role in how people were presented music. Especially things like chill playlists or workout playlists.

Things like functional music. but trying to trace, you know, earlier than the 2016, 2017 era, [00:17:00] I went and interviewed people who were close to the company at the time. And I also spent a lot of time on the internet archive, looking at the front page of Spotify and trying to trace when things changed and when the company’s presentation of its products specifically changed.

Mack Hagood: That is, I mean, can I just pause there? Like for, we have a lot of people who do research in this who listened to this podcast. I mean, that is such a great mode of doing research is just going through the internet archive and looking at those different front pages. I love that

Liz Pelly: Thank you. And you know, it was super interesting because there was a specific moment. It was around December 2012, where before that moment, the front page of Spotify had been really simple. It was like a white background and green and black and gray text. And it was all about explaining how easy and simple and frictionless it was to subscribe to Spotify, or to access [00:18:00] Spotify for free and get access to a world of music.

Like this was sort of the way in which it was pitched. It was instant, simple, and free. You know, this product gives you easy access to all the music you could ever imagine. And then there was this really specific moment where it really shifted and it was less about, looking like kind of a tech company website.

And all of a sudden it was this montage of hazy images, like moody, sort of washed over like, you know, someone, driving with a sun flare and there was actually a song that auto played in the background. It was like this really kind of moody generic, like folk song playing in the background. So I would auto play when you went to the website 

Mack Hagood: Really? 

Liz Pelly: Yeah, it’s really interesting.

And there’s like, you know, sun flares, people driving, people kind of like hanging out with their friends, with their loved ones, like in a hammock together. And it was really all about showing you these distinct moments in your life where you might [00:19:00] be listening to music or might be listening to Spotify.

In my book, I described the photos as like stock photos in a picture frame, like waiting to be replaced by real life or something like that. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like the early Instagram aesthetic.

Liz Pelly: Exactly, definitely. Like the early Instagram filter aesthetic, or even like, it sort of looked like images you would see on Tumblr or Pinterest at the time or something like that. So to me, it became clear that something strategically had happened at that moment, where they had decided that, in order to reach more people, They had to think of themselves more as sort of pitching a lifestyle or pitching different ways of users relating to what they were offering.

And in one of the interviews that I did, it came up that around this time, Spotify had commissioned a research agency to do a study on its product and its own users, to figure out how people were actually using [00:20:00] Spotify. This was also about , just over a year after they launched in the United States, where there was not only more competition than in, , other markets in terms of, selling the specific idea of how to relate to digital music, because, there were other streaming services in the United States and there also was,, more people used the iTunes store.

More people listen to mp3s and buy digital music. So they were kind of competing, also with Pandora, Rhapsody. And according to this person who was close to the company at the time, who told me about this research study that they commissioned, apparently they Found out through this research that a vast majority of their listeners were coming to the platform for more of a lean back experience, , and that they started to think of what they were offering less as, access to this world of music, access to this fully stocked, , iTunes library, but streams through the Internet, maybe similar to the experience , users [00:21:00] had come to expect in the post file sharing era, , there’s this interview that I referenced early on in the book, as a conference appearance by Andres Ehn who is the first, Spotify’s first employee.

And he talks about how in the early days, they didn’t see their competition as other music services, but they saw their competition as the pirate Bay and how, you know, it seems like what they, talk about how, what they were trying to offer initially was a product that was better than piracy, not competing with piracy, but better than piracy.

So they were really thinking of the experience of the file sharing music listener, as the person they were trying to win over. And it seems like after there was this specific moment where they realized that actually , their new target listener was becoming more of like the Pandora listener or the person who is coming to the service and looking for, you know, a button that they can press and listen to a feed of music organized around, a specific, theme, or who maybe needed [00:22:00] more guidance in terms of what to listen to.

So I think it was distinctly related to having to grow in the United States. Even in the press at the time, they talked about how they were embracing this moods and moments strategy as part of needing to grow beyond early adopters and reach a more mainstream audience, which I think is pretty interesting. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah, and there was definitely something in the air around then because I remember Beats Music, which eventually became Apple Music, had something called The Sentence. I don’t know if you ever came across this, but it was this really bizarre thing where there was like a sent-, a literal sentence, but it had pull down menus and it was like, I’m, Blank and you could pull down like hanging with my homies or like chilling with my pets or whatever. And I want to, you know, feel like, and it ended up like lifted or like, they’re just like all of these [00:23:00] weird, you know, adjectives for the emotional feeling that you wanted to have at that moment. And then you would just fill this sentence with things from the pull down menu and then it would just generate, you know, an on the fly radio station for you at that moment. I don’t really know how that happened, how it worked in the background, but there was, I’m not sure precisely what year that was. That might’ve been, it was probably after what Spotify did, but I’m not, I’m really not a hundred percent sure, there was definitely this kind of strategy in the air. 

Liz Pelly: Yeah, there’s also Songza, which was another company that existed at the same time. That was doing sort of like concierge type mood playlist Recommendations and they were a company that got mentioned in the press at the time, you know So following this shift, Spotify bought this company Tunigo, which was at first a third party app on its platform for what they called ready made playlists that [00:24:00] were themed to different moods and moments and .

They were compared a lot to Songza in the music business press at the time.

Now, at the same time that this is happening, it’s not like genre based playlists have gone away. There are the Rap Caviars and the Pitchfork curated playlists and things of that ilk. One thing I was really interested to learn about was that there was almost like a farm league of playlists with the smaller playlists that they would, maybe A B test songs against one another in these smaller playlists and see things like skip rates, that a song could sort of… through these different metrics work its way up from a smaller playlist to a more popular playlist, , and I guess, between the mood based and the human tested curated playlists, I guess you could say, like, “What’s wrong with that?” I [00:25:00] think Daniel Ek would say this is democratic form of programming, right? Like, like we’re letting people’s stated choices and, or, at least the choices that their behavior tells us through examining the data, choose what’s popular. So, what’s wrong with that? 

I think that narrative around the democratic, meritocratic data driven playlist ladder climb, where they would say that, the music that ends up on these really popular playlists is informed by user data. We’re looking at putting songs on these smaller feeder playlists and testing them and seeing which ones react.

And if it reacts, we’ll move it up. In some ways, , I also think that was sort of like a narrative that they sold to the independent music world to convince independent labels and independent artists that this was a democratic system when in reality, there were so many other factors that would influence whether or not [00:26:00] a song ended up on a popular playlist and, to this day, talking to people in the music world, it seems that there’s no better way to get onto a Spotify playlist than to just simply know one of the people who works there.

Or to have some sort of direct relationship due to a marketing team relationship, the major labels. 

Mack Hagood: So there’s still some old school gatekeeping going? 

Liz Pelly: Absolutely. You know, like the very first article that I wrote about streaming was about the privileged relationship that the major labels had with playlist curators. And at the time I interviewed a major label, , someone who worked in digital marketing for a major label who talked about how it was just a different level of access, how major labels had dedicated reps at these companies and dedicated employees at their labels who would take meetings, send over Excel spreadsheets of priorities, those phone calls. Maybe not like guaranteed placement because of some marketing relationship, but a different level of access.

And I think even now, you know, [00:27:00] musicians are told if you want to get onto Spotify playlist, there’s this form that you fill out and you have to pitch your songs two to three weeks in advance and put the proper tags and a description and how you’re trying to target this. It’s like, if you are an artist on a major label especially if you are an in-demand artist on a major label, like you’re not filling out the Google form, you’re not filling out the form on Spotify for artists website. You know, there’s a different type of relationship there. So that is, even to this day, I think it continues to be interesting to remember. 

Mack Hagood: So in fact, it’s not as democratic or demotic equity lead us to believe. Let’s just say it was, would that solve the problem? would that, make it 

Liz Pelly: Well, I guess it depends, the context that you’re discussing, I think, because something also that I think in the streaming era, there’s, this idea that [00:28:00] these playlists are helping people listen to more music than they would be listening to otherwise that, you know, maybe you don’t, know what you want to listen to, but putting on like a morning commute playlist could introduce you to 50 new artists that you’d never heard of before.

And sometimes you’ll hear people say things like, “I listened to 6,000 new musicians last year. How could you say I’m not discovering new music?” And I think something to remember is the way in which coming to a platform and listening to these sort of mood and moment curated playlists encourages this kind of more passive relationship with what you’re listening to. More functional relationship with what you’re listening to, and it’s like how, you know, much of a connection is actually being made between the listener and these 6,000 artists that you might have listened to through listening to Spotify curated playlists or niche mixes, for example. [00:29:00] And you know, in the trace the history of music being used as a tool of mood stabilization. And I think that the idea that this kind of way of engaging with music would be a means to discovery is almost funny when you put it in the context of other ways that music has been used as a means of mood stabilization throughout history. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. And you do talk about things like Muzak the old BBC radio show, the music to work by and that sort of, affective control that music can offer. you talk a little bit about. The calculation that Spotify made, like there was a, there seems to be a moment when they realized that if we can make the experience of, listening to music, like utterly frictionless through the interface and perhaps make [00:30:00] it a little less more frictionless aesthetically, where it’s not quite as demanding of your attention, we can maximize the number of hours that people are using our product, which is what we really want, because either, either they’re going to integrate our product throughout their day and they’re going to paying for their subscription, or they’re going to hear as many ads as possible.

And that’s going to help us that way. Right. So, I think the term that you use for this, you mentioned earlier is “lean back listening”. Can you maybe really delve into that a little bit more?

Liz Pelly: I think that one of the things in that part of the book is trying to sort of look at what it means for a streaming service to sort of, champion this way of relating to music and what some of the consequences of it might be for listeners and for musicians. 

You know, it was really interesting talking to some former employees.

And I had [00:31:00] this one conversation where someone said, you know, some of these bigger sweeping changes that have happened in the history of Spotify or on streaming platforms, these things that in retrospect might seem sort of like nefarious or like someone is trying to control listeners.

A lot of times it’s people being tasked with moving a metric and their job is just to kind of look and say, well, when we put this playlist on the front page, , , people clicked on it and the listening sessions were healthy. So let’s just keep putting this on the front page, that kind of thing. 

Someone else explained one of the early goals of the playlist ecosystem as trying to reduce the cognitive work that the user had to do when they opened the platform, which obviously would also, for a user who may not know what they want to listen to would potentially lead to helping someone know what to click on, what they want to listen to, extending the [00:32:00] amount of time that they spend on the platform or extending a session length.

It’s like these things that may be in the moment to the people who work there don’t seem like a big deal. are planting the seeds for these bigger cultural shifts where when you have an environment where all you’re doing is following the data and trying to optimize for this , frictionless user experience, to grow time on the platform, to grow session length, to in some ways, help shape user behavior around your own product. These things that might seem not that consequential. In the moment, add up and do you end up, I think, having a cultural impact.

Mack Hagood: Absolutely. And I’m so glad you said that because we tend to always find villains around every corner. In my own research into these kinds of sound technologies that help us have affective control, I’ve really liked every single person I’ve met working in this space who are developing new forms of noise [00:33:00] cancellation or who developed, Practice of listening to artificial nature sounds, you know, it’s like I think cumulatively we have a social problem in which we’re we’ve become accustomed to the idea that are listening is something that’s supposed to be completely managed and we’re not supposed to experience anything we don’t want to hear. And I think that has major, bad effects for public discourse and interpersonal discourse and a lot of things. But the individuals who are working on these technologies are just trying to solve a particular problem generally. Like how do we eliminate noises that bother people?

And you know, that it’s not… there’s no evil intent there.

Liz Pelly: Right. 

Mack Hagood: Another thing that struck me about what you just said. It was the real emphasis on things being frictionless, which again, if you’re designing a platform that totally makes sense, friction is [00:34:00] good, right? Friction makes us stronger.

Like, you know, if people, whatever, lift weights, like it’s the resistance that allows you to grow stronger. And the frictions that are involved in pursuing something are a big part of its aesthetic. Enjoyment and its meaning, right? the friction of going all the way to the record store and investing that time and flipping through stacks of stuff you’re not interested in and finding that one gem, that’s part of the enjoyment and it, calls to mind. this guy who designed one of the AI platforms that just spit out music for you. And he recently said in an interview that making music is too hard and musicians don’t enjoy it. And you have to do all these hours of practicing and you might not ever be good. And it’s like, as a guitar player, who [00:35:00] I’ve been playing since I was like 15 years old, like I’m 55 now. and I’m still not great. Right. Like, and, but it’s that struggle to get better. That is like part of the pleasure of playing. I’m like, this guy is totally missing the point of what musical experience is all about.

That was a bit of a ramble, but, I mean, this dichotomy between making information flow as frictionlessly as possible seems to be at odds with giving culture meaning and having a rich experience with it.

Liz Pelly: For sure. And I also think about it from another perspective, which is thinking about the role music critics have historically played in recommending and contextualizing music. And, I think about this way of recommending music in the most frictionless way possible and this idea, when you, when I hear [00:36:00] something like, “The founder of an AI company saying making music is too hard”

People don’t want to learn how to play instruments or even, this idea that a streaming platform should help people reduce cognitive work. It’s like, That essentially means we should help people not have to think. And I think that, you know, like critics, what we do is encourage people to think, you know, thinking and making decisions is an important part of processing life in the world and information and culture and figuring out how you actually feel about someone’s art. 

As critics, we want to encourage people to think. And that’s why I describe this pursuit of a frictionless experience, this idea that people don’t want to make decisions, this idea of following the data and just being pushing this really data driven experience of receiving music.

It’s like it’s not only not fulfilling [00:37:00] the role that critics, I mean, it’s obviously not fulfilling the role that critics have played historically in presenting into contextualizing music, but I also think it’s actively anti critical because it’s telling people, it’s encouraging people not to think and encouraging people to not think is, Extremely anti critical, anti intellectual.

It’s like encouraging people to just trust the data. Just, you know, yeah, the music that we’re showing you, we’re showing you because the data has told us that you will like it. So you should just believe us and you should just. listen to it and like it, , 

Mack Hagood: Yeah, no, that’s right. And it’s encouraging us not to think and also sort of encouraging us not to feel, , you know, because I remember, gosh, it’s been probably 10 years. Now, I remember asking my friend, music journalist, Eric Harvey about things like, “Eric, what’s going on with hip hop?”

Like , it all sounds so sad and [00:38:00] blasé and kind of mellow. Like it’s kind of aesthetically beautiful now, but it also is so dispassionate and I was like, what’s happening with that? And I think your journalism has really helped me connect the dots between the incentives of the platform and the kinds of music that succeeded.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed that about hip hop in particular, but I mean, You’ve certainly talked about the aesthetic of chill. So, can we maybe talk about what kinds of aesthetics seem to get privileged in this era of lean back listening?

Liz Pelly: Well, I could say I also do think that a similar thing has happened, in the musical realm of like indie rock too, you know, like, they’re even talking to people who run indie rock labels for my book. There is this idea that  music that was softer or that had softer vocal deliveries or more , emotionally, not flattened, [00:39:00] like less adventurous in terms of dynamic range, or something is the kind of music that does well in the streaming era.

And, you know, it’s not to say that I think that’s the only type of music that people are making, but I think for people who aren’t making this sort of music like whispery, more chill, more soft music. It’s harder to break through. And I think it does encourage a general softening around the edges. 

There’s a chapter of the book called Streambait Pop, which is an extended take on this essay that I wrote in 2018 for the Baffler called Streambait Pop. They’re sort of looking more at this, in terms of the way in which the rise of mood playlists and playlists determined by emotions and affect were influencing the sound of music.

Liz Pelly: For that piece, I talked to A pop songwriter who was talking about how it had been become common at the time to go into record, writing sessions and hear people say that they wanted to make, a Spotify song or a song specifically targeting specific [00:40:00] Spotify playlists. how there was this, you know, specific sounds that he felt like had emerged that time.

And that was also around the time that a musician like Billie Eilish became really popular. It was this kind of whispery sort of pop music that could do well on these sort of like chill vibe or sad vibe playlists and it was interesting, going back to that piece in 2022/2023 when I was working on the book.

I think by that point it became, really clear to me that it’s not just that streaming services, are shaping the sound of pop music, but there is a sort of like broader history that needs to be there to contextualize it, that, mediums for recording and releasing music and the technology that musicians and artists use to create their work have always impacted the sounds of, their music.

Music and yeah, I know this is more of like an academics oriented podcast, but before I started writing my book, I read “Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Canged Music” by Mark [00:41:00] Katz. And that was really instructive and sort of like understanding this like broader history there.

 So that is referenced in my new updated version of Streambait pop in the book. but also, you know, it was interesting. Looking at these, effects of the playlist environment on not just pop music, but other sorts of genres as well. And yeah, speaking with people in other corners of music or operating on smaller scales about the impact of this as well.

And I also took that chapter for the new expanded version of it. Talk to some songwriter, a songwriter who had participated in a Spotify songwriting camp, which was, really interesting to, hearing how some of these, aesthetic trends discussed within like the realm of, Spotify core were sort of like true to the kind of music that was like, at least in the case of this one musician, like true to the music that was coming out of those sessions as well.

Mack Hagood: That’s fascinating. And then this songwriting camp, was it actually sponsored by [00:42:00] Spotify? 

Liz Pelly: Yeah. Yeah. It was hosted by Spotify.

Mack Hagood: That’s wild. I remember some quotes from Greg Saunier from Deerhoof. Like the sort of, I can’t remember specifically, but he always has so many fiery takes on things, but particularly like this world, I mean, it’s funny in our last episode, we wound up mentioning Deerhoof for some reason. You can imagine Deerhoof in the way it leaps from one genre to another and demands your attention in a lot of interesting ways because it does so much unexpected musical work. Not really being a band that would work as well in the Spotify era.

Liz Pelly: Yeah, I’ve interviewed Greg for the first piece that I wrote for the Baffler back in 2017, and then did another interview with him for my book. And I feel like, well, one, Greg just always has like so [00:43:00] many interesting things to say about the state of the world and even not just music.

But yeah, I think they’re a really interesting band to kind of comment on this trajectory of the way that independent music has been impacted by the streaming era because they’re a band that has been making music really like on their own terms since the nineties and worked with so many of the labels that we think of when we think about the idea of independent music in the popular imagination and they also are an example of a band that like, you know, had a really dedicated fan base before the impacts of the streaming era, emerged. 

And I think they can sort of, but I think it’s always interesting. I think that lots of critics have different perspectives on this, on how we should consider the perspective of musicians whose careers span back to before the dawn of the streaming era something I’ll hear a lot is, critics saying, “Well, these artists are just complaining about the streaming era because they were, one of the lucky few who [00:44:00] happened to have careers in the pre streaming era” And it’s always been hard for everyone. So I don’t know. I think it’s actually kind of the opposite.

I think that musicians whose careers span back to the pre streaming era are really well positioned to show. how things have changed and to speak to it. That’s something that is interesting about their perspectives. 

Mack Hagood: I agree with that. And I think these digital trends hit differently, generationally. So ultimately if Spotify could get people to tap on moods, it wouldn’t really matter that much what specific songs were found in those playlists. And then that paves the way for two phenomena that you have also written about, which is. Ghost artists and AI generated music. Can you talk about what’s been happening in that regard?

Liz Pelly: Yeah. And I think that one thing that I tried to emphasize in the book is [00:45:00] how, there is this era where Spotify curated editorial playlists, often categorized by mood, had a really big cultural impact. And in some ways, There’s one former employee I interviewed who refers to 2016 to 2019 as the peak playlist era, but right off the bat, correctly points out that in the music business.

Now the top of the discovery funnel has shifted away from these curated playlists made by Spotify editors. And now there’s a lot more influence coming from personalized feeds and algorithmic recommendations and platforms like TikTok and short form video as sort of, illustrating how discovery has really shifted in this next era of the digital music economy.

But something that I try to point out or show is how there have been all of these effects of all of these sort of other impacts of listening being reshaped [00:46:00] around this concept of, you know, click here for happy, click here for sad, click here for chill, click here for upbeat party vibes, and how it’s not just, you know, that these platforms had a role reshaping listening around their own editorial playlists, but also that it paved the way and like helped prime this idea of listening to music, according to these types of buttons that you can press.

And I think that, one of the, long term impacts of that does have to do with like the way in which in some ways it sort of encourages people to have more of a relationship with the playlist they’re listening to or the mood category that they’re they’ve organized they’re listening around than necessarily the artists and it again is like one of those things that could seem subtle but actually you know reorganizing music in a way where it is more about the , the vibe or the playlist category, then necessarily, , having any sort of [00:47:00] connection with the artists that are, , being played does in some ways, I think, set people up for, , being more desensitized to the way in which music made by generative AI could start either filling these playlists or, you know, like you think of something like earlier, you were talking about Suno or these kinds of generative AI music platforms, even something like Endel, which I talk about in the book, or, like these products that are basically just like click here for a vibe and we’ll give you an AI generated feed of music that fits that vibe.

And you have no relationship at all with the people who are creating the music. In some ways I think the general playlist economy, the devaluing of the artists making the music you’re listening to, pointing people towards these, anonymous ghost artists, you know, essentially like low royalty stock music that has started to be over the years,  has filled up some of these more leanback playlists. [00:48:00] 

Like I think it does have these bigger cultural impacts of just generally devaluing the role of the artist, in and prioritizing the role of, , the tech product or the, playlist name or the shaping a relationship around the product that’s delivering the music and not the music itself. 

Mack Hagood: Okay, folks, that’s it for this version of my interview with Liz Pelly. Remember, you can get the full interview and bonus content at patreon.com/phantompower. The Patreon has been growing slowly, but surely. And it’s a great motivator to keep these episodes coming. We also have free membership. So if you just want to join our email list and keep up with what’s happening around here, that’s a great way to do it.

Again, it’s all at patreon.com/phantom power. And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks to Liz Pelly for being on the show, see show notes, links, and [00:49:00] more for this episode at phantompod.org. Please remember to subscribe to us and rate and review us on the platform of your choice platforms.

And I want to thank my Miami University assistants, Katelyn Phan, Nisso Sascha, and Lauren Kelly for their help with the show.

Josiah Wolf of the band WHY helped me make my intro soundscape and the one and only Alex Blue, aka Blue the Fifth, did our outro music. Got feedback? Send it to mac at mactrasound.com or hit me up on socials at Mactra. See you next time. 

The post How Spotify Dulls the Musical Mind (Liz Pelly) appeared first on Phantom Power.

In this episode, host Mack Hagood dives into the world of AI-generated music and art with digital artist and theorist Eryk Salvaggio. The conversation explores technical and philosophical aspects of AI art, its impact on culture, and the ‘age of noise’ it has ushered in. AI dissolves sounds and images into literal noise, subsequently reversing the process to create new “hypothetical” sounds and images. The kinds of cultural specificities that archivists struggle to preserve are stripped away when we treat human culture as data in this way. 

Eryk also shares insights into his works like ‘Swim’ and ‘Sounds Like Music,’ which test AI’s limitations and forces the machine to reflect on itself in revealing ways. Finally, the episode contemplates how to find meaning and context in an overwhelming sea of information. 

Eryk Salvaggio is a researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. His work explores the creative misuse of AI and the transformation of archives into datasets for AI training: a practice designed to expose ideologies of tech and to confront the gaps between datasets and the worlds they claim to represent. A blend of hacker, researcher, designer and artist, he has been published in academic journals, spoken at music and film festivals, and consulted on tech policy at the national level. He is a researcher on AI, art and education at the metaLab (at) Harvard University, the Emerging Technology Research Advisor to the Siegel Family Endowment, and a top contributor to Tech Policy Press. He holds an MSc in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and an MSc in Applied Cybernetics from the Australian National University.

Works discussed in this podcast: 

The Age of Noise (2024)

SWIM (2024): A meditation on training data, memory, and archives.

Sounds Like Music: Toward a Multi-Modal Media Theory of Gaussian Pop (2024)

How to Read an AI Image (2023)

You can learn more about Eryk Salvaggio at cyberneticforests.com

Learn more about Phantom Power at phantompod.org 

Join our Patreon at patreon.com/phantompower

Transcription by Katelyn Phan

00:00 Introduction and Podcast News 03:24 Introducing Eryk Salvaggio, AI Artist and Theorist 05:33 Understanding the Information Age and Noise 09:14 The Diffusion Process and AI Bias 33:35 Ethics of AI and Data Curation 39:09 Exploring the Artwork ‘Swim’ 45:16 AI in Music: Platforms and Experiments 01:00:04 Embracing Noise and Context

Eryk Salvaggio: I think as consumers of the music generated by AI, that’s the thing that I want to think about is as a listener, what am I hearing and how do I listen like meaningfully to a piece of AI music that essentially has no meaning. 

Introduction: This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, the show where we dive deep into sound studies, acoustic ecology, sound art, experimental music, all things sonic. I’m Mack Hagood. Today we’re talking to the digital artist and theorist, Eryk Salvaggio. We’ll be diving into the question of what is AI art and AI music? And we’re going to attack this question on both the technical and the philosophical level.

We’re also going to talk about how to live in what Eryk calls, “the age of noise”. It’s a really interesting conversation, so stick around. But first I want to just go over a few quick show notes. For those of you listening in your podcast feed, you will have noticed that after something of a hiatus, We’re back.

I am looking forward to bringing you this podcast, once a month in 2025. We have a lot of fascinating interviews on tap next month. Journalist Liz Pelly will be with us to discuss her new book on Spotify. I could not be more excited about that. For those of you joining us on YouTube or maybe Spotify, you’ll notice that you can see me.

So it’s taken a lot of work, but we have officially jumped on the video podcast bandwagon. I think today’s episode is going to show the power of that, because we’re going to be talking not only about music, but also about video art made by AI. And it’s going to be helpful to actually see it with your eyes. But no worries to all of our dedicated audio listeners and visually impaired folks.

We’re going to be sure to describe anything relevant that’s seen on the screen. So audio or video, feel free to enjoy Phantom Power in the modality of your choice. And if you’re watching or listening for the first time, please do subscribe wherever you’re encountering this flow of waveforms and pixels.

And finally for longtime listeners who have been following along with my epic saga of trying to pivot from writing academic works to writing for the public, I’m thrilled to announce that I got a book deal. My next book will be coming out on Penguin Press. And for those of you who have been following along with this saga, you’ll know that I’ve done episodes and Patreon posts about how I found an agent, what it’s like to work with an agent, writing a proposal.

and so I’m going to have more bonus content in my Patreon feed where I talk about the final stages of how we crafted the proposal and shopped it to publishers and had meetings and had an auction and all that kind of stuff. So if you want the inside scoop. Just join our Patreon at patreon.com/phantompower.

Okay. Onto today’s guest. My guest today is Eryk Salvaggio. Eryk is a researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. His work explores the creative misuse of AI and the transformation of archives into datasets for AI training. Eryk is a researcher at the Meta Lab at Harvard.

He has advanced degrees in media communications, and applied cybernetics from the London School of Economics and the Australian National University. And you may know Salvaggio from his widely read newsletter on AI, Cybernetic Forests. I met Eryk last year at the Unsound Festival in Cracow, Poland, where we were both speaking and Eryk gave this dynamite performance lecture called the age of noise, which incorporated some of his video experiments with artificial intelligence.

And this talk just blew me away. I knew I wanted to bring him to you. So today we’re discussing how AI systems literally dissolve human culture, images, video. ,music, they dissolve them into noise and then use that noise as a starting point to create new objects that look and sound like cultural objects, yet lack human characteristics.

So welcome to the age of noise.

Here’s my interview with Eryk salvaggio All right, Eryk welcome to the show. 

Eryk Salvaggio: Thanks so much. I’m really excited to be here. 

Mack Hagood: So I had the pleasure hearing you speak at the Unsound Festival in Krakow. And I was just blown away by your talk, which concerned the role of noise in generative AI. And it also made a larger point about noise and contemporary digital life. And the central claim of that talk was that we have basically finished the information age and we’ve entered this, what you call, “age of noise”. 

I think we’ll eventually make our way to AI and the age of noise, but I was thinking maybe we could start off by how would you characterize the information age? It’s certainly a term we’ve heard a lot, but how are you thinking about it? Say in the talk that, you gave. 

Eryk Salvaggio: If you look at the early age of computing, if you look at the early age of communication, there was this belief and it’s not necessarily a wrong belief, that the more information we have access to, the more knowledge we have about the world and the more agency we have in the world, the more informed our decisions could be.

And so much of technology in that century, starting in the cybernetic era of the forties and the fifties even was around., “How do you get information? And make sense of that information?” And then when we started moving closer to the communication networks, it was more about , “How do you distribute this information so that everybody has access to this information?”

And all of it was around this idea that information is super valuable and that if we have information, we could become in a way, better people, better citizens.

And then with the internet. It becomes this weird mirror where everyone’s able to access information, but they’re also able to produce it. And the production of information is, measured and it’s weighed and it’s distributed by this sort of other worldly power that we’ve come to call the algorithm.

And so everything’s being sorted and we don’t necessarily have access to the information that we need to understand the world. Instead, we have information that is a mess, right? And it’s a fire hose. It’s overwhelming. And so my argument in the age of noise is that this information age piece that was just this access to information has become so overwhelming and so hard to process that it has become essentially noise.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. And I loved like there, there’s a point in the talk where you’re talking about the role of noise in the information age. And you’re basically talking about information theory and we should probably have a drinking game for this podcast at time. I mentioned Claude Shannon, cause

I always mentioned Claude Shannon.  You talk about, how noise was this thing that sort of crept into circuits and crept into the

channel and that noise was this residual energy of the big bang.

and our task was to remove any traces of noise from our phone calls. And, then we get to this point where the information age has given us so much high quality signal, so to speak, that in itself becomes noise, right? And, what’s. Really interesting to me is that like all of these pieces of data, they’re all indexed to one another, right?

There are captions pointing to pictures and there are descriptions and hyperlinks pointing to songs and whatnot. and this is what growing AI models eat for breakfast. so maybe we can talk,

about how AI models digest this data, let’s maybe get into the nitty gritty of how they work. 

Eryk Salvaggio: Generative AI is based on for the most part, something called a diffusion process. So what we are working with when we work with images and video and sounds for the most part is in the current state of the art, something called a diffusion model. And, this idea is it is diffused, right?

So what does that mean? Essentially what it means is as information that we’ve uploaded, wherever it’s been uploaded, whatever the training data may be. Comes into the model to train the model, information is actually stripped out of it. So if you have an image. It becomes really grainy in steps, and it becomes degraded over the course of several steps, until it is an image of visual static.

A similar thing happens with music. Music is ingested to train the model, and what happens is information is taken out of it, and the same thing happens. It’s noise, and ends up producing a kind of wall of white noise. And video is a very similar thing. With video, it’s blur and noise. 

Mack Hagood: I noticed when I was like looking up diffusion models that, you’ll see terms like, like Gaussian noise and Markov chain, but you’ll also need to see words like “destroy”. So, basically is the AI is destroying the image? Is it just gradually turning it from information into noise? 

Eryk Salvaggio: It is stripping every possible piece of information out of it in steps. And it does this by following this Gaussian distribution, which means that basically, to be very brief about it, there’s a pattern that the noise follows, and the model learns the pattern of noise being introduced. or, information being removed, same thing.

It follows a particular pattern and because it’s a pattern, it can trace it backward. So you go from an image of pure noise back to the original training image or song. And then what happens is when you generate is it creates a random constellation of pixels and whatever your prompt is, going to try to find a similar path.

Now we’re talking as if it’s one image, right? But it is thousands, hundreds. It’s actually billions of images, in the current state of the art for Stable Diffusion and things like that. So you have billions of images, and so you have billions of paths, and when you type a prompt, you’re basically saying, follow the path that more or less, conforms to the images associated with this keyword or this set of keywords.

So if I say flowers for a prompt, it’s going to this paths of flowers. So it is literally a noise that is at the heart of generative systems. And I think that’s really fascinating. 

Mack Hagood: And the example of flowers, you actually have, maybe we can take a look at it. You have a piece where you show this dissolution of an image, 

Eryk Salvaggio: so in a demonstration that I do quite often, I start with a picture of flowers. Hypothetically, these are flowers that I’ve uploaded to a social media platform or, a photo hosting website, and I’ve captioned it, “Flowers, somehow, flowers for my sweetheart” right?

Maybe I’m really cheesy on Valentine’s Day. And so this image comes in, and it strips this information out. Some of the first things that go away are the backgrounds, right? It emphasizes like high contrast areas, like the petals in the flowers and the stems of the flowers. And as you go, you realize, okay, I can no longer really tell what the background color was, but I can make out what the petals were.

The really basic shapes stay the longest. And so if you’re thinking about this in reverse, which is the generation of the image, the very first thing that’s generated are these sort of abstract shapes. And that’s what gives the image its structure, but the abstract shapes are just can appear anywhere in this noise.

And there’s another sort of image recognition system that’s saying, yeah, that sort of looks like a flower. and it has to be more and more certain as you go. So the first image that is generated, the first step of this process, doesn’t have to be quite like it’s not going to be a perfect flower.

So maybe the threshold of recognition is like 10 percent chance this thing’s a flower, but every step, the criteria gets a little bit higher. And so what is allowed to pass, is what is recognized by an image recognition system as something that resembles a flower. And so that is how it works.

That’s how it becomes noise. That’s why it becomes noise. And then in the generation process, that’s why you start from noise. 

Mack Hagood: So the sort of contours of the argument in the talk, as I recall, is that we’ve gone from this era where a signal or information was this hard, one thing that had to be carefully sifted from the background noise of the universe and the big bang, into this moment where there’s so many signals that they become noise and we struggle to consume it.

We struggle to make meaning of all of it because there’s just so much of it that we don’t, know what to do with it. But. Then we get AI, which knows exactly what to do with it. AI is just like “Yum yum, yum” And just gobbles all of this up. It needs that noise in order to do its own process, which is to reduce images to noise, and then just be able to vomit out exponentially more images.

In theory than what we’ve already placed there. So I guess my question is, what do you want us to make of that? Is this just something that sounds scary? Or is there something in your cultural, social, political critique here that, we really need to be aware of. 

Eryk Salvaggio: So my feeling is, you have these machines that are taking in this human generated information. Pieces of cultural expression, text we write, archives are coming in here, and it becomes noise. And there’s something there, right? Is that something that we want this culture to happen to this culture that we’ve produced, right?

That it becomes literally, decimated. And then, what’s an important part of that, is that when we talk about noise, it is a really interesting concept. Because there’s so many definitions of what noise is and how we want to navigate noise and typically, we are in a noisy world, right? We operate in noisy environments.

We have some agency over the decisions we make in terms of what we focus on in that noise and what choices we make in the space of noise that we live in. And one strategy is to think about all the stuff that’s happened before and how that fits the noise and how we can keep following those patterns into the future.

And that is one strategy 

Mack Hagood: So like retaining some kind of human meaning? And trying to find, based on our past history, what we value what’s important? Or…

Eryk Salvaggio: Think so if we’re a person and we’re trying to navigate something really noisy and loud and we’re overwhelmed, what’s the first thing we do? Is we look for something that is familiar to us, right? And oftentimes if something scary is happening in the world, we’ll try to fit it to a pattern that we’re familiar with “Oh, we’ll give it a label, right?”

And when we give it a label it helps us navigate and understand that thing, but these labels are this label and prediction response from people is actually what we do when we’re scared, right? And if we are feeling playful and relaxed, Then noise can actually be inspiring and fun.

And we can think about different ways to navigate, like the noise of a party is very different from the noise of a riot, right? If you’re at a party and you’re enjoying yourself, you’re laughing and things are loud, you don’t mind. If you’re in a riot, your thing is look for safety, find the thing.

What do I do? Follow the rules that I have in my head of how to get out of this place, and you focus exclusively on the sort of prior references.

And so what I’m trying to say with this is when we’re building AI, what we are modeling when we’re creating a system that is trying to produce creative resemblance to creativity. Whether it’s in an image or a song, is that actually what we’re doing is training.

We’re constraining all the possibilities of this noise. To the patterns that are learned by the training data. So that if I am trying to create something playful and fun, that breaks the boundaries of say genre or plays with the borders of, what image making can be, right? Something really, truly, experimental and playful and creative in the sense of challenging the past, challenging ideas of, the representation that is present in photography, right?

What have people done before? I want to play with that. You don’t actually get to challenge it. You are constrained to the training data. You are constrained to representations in that training data of what has come before. You don’t really, focus on, when you, get these images back, And there’s these generic defaults, right?

You don’t get something challenging. You get something very comforting. You get something very easy to see. You get something very referenceable because you’re actually navigating it to references, right? You’re asking, you’re using the style of an artist or the genre that exists, right?

There’s limits to what’s possible there. 

Mack Hagood: But this is funny because that you’re talking about, getting images that are. average or comforting, normate, so to speak. but I really was excited in the very early days of AI video, because it was so not that. Like the, people I’m forgetting the name of, the one artist who was just being like, there were several people who were doing this, but there was one who was particularly good, who made these just hideously, disturbing, uncanny videos of people morphing. And as the AI struggled 

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah, no, absolutely. So one of the things that I really like about AI is that it’s glitchy. And I think that there’s a lot to explore in those glitches. So even for me, when I’m using an AI system, I’m interested in how does it actually deal with noise? If the entire purpose of this system is to remove noise, what happens if I ask it to generate noise?

And I’ve been able to play with this and what happens is actually it doesn’t reference things in the training data. What it does instead is get confused, right? And I’m personifying it 

in a way, right? 

Mack Hagood: To clarify, I wanna make sure I understand what you’re saying here. You ask the AI to make

noise? 

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah. So I ask it for visual noise, various types of ways of soliciting images of noise. So you can ask for television static, right? You can ask for things that we know because we know how the system works, that the system is designed to remove. So the system is designed to remove noise. It’s designed to remove static because that’s what it’s starting with, but it’s expecting you to ask for something like a flower or a Rembrandt, right?

It’s not asking, it’s not expecting… the designers were not expecting you to ask for images of digital static and the system cannot accommodate giving 

Mack Hagood: you… 

What does it show you? 

Eryk Salvaggio: What it does is, essentially give you abstraction and it gives you computer generated abstraction. And it’s an artifact of the machine essentially producing something randomly and asking this other verification system in the machine, which is for the techies out there.

It’s clip, right? So clip is trying to say, “10 percent chance that is a flower” But now it’s being asked for a 10 percent chance that it’s noise. But it is noise. It is already noise. So it passes through and then it goes to the next step of noise removal. And so then this originating system has to remove noise from this process.

And then it has to send it over to Clip again. And Clip is like, “Yeah, still noise” right? And so then it goes back and it does another step of removing things towards this abstract concept of what noise is. So it’s actually inflicting a kind of paradox. Into the system, or it’s almost mutually exclusive in a way to say it’s an image of noise, but you have to remove the noise to make the image of noise.

So what you get is never truly a representation of static or digital noise in the way that we might imagine it. It’s always structured based on how the model is trying to remove noise. And the system that’s saying, “Try it again, do it again” Failing. So it’s a kind of feedback loop in the system, but it’s a glitched one.

Mack Hagood: I think I wanted to maybe get you to build this out a little bit in terms of, actual dataset that’s used. You mentioned clip, which I believe is like the machine learning tool that interacts with the dataset. Can you talk about the sort of canonical dataset that all of our AI images are coming from right now? Because I think that’s really fascinating. 

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah. If you’re looking at, the open source tools, which are for the most part, the major one you have right now is Stable Diffusion. A lot of other models exist, but a lot of them are built on top of Stable Diffusion. So essentially Stable Diffusion is if you’re using an open source model, if you’re a company that is starting to work with image generation, you’re taking Stable Diffusion and you’re building on top of it, or you’re, changing it somehow on the backend or you’re fine tuning it.

but Stable Diffusion is like the core. There’s proprietary systems, OpenAI has its own models. We don’t know what’s in there. We don’t know what’s in the training data for those models, Midjourney, we know uses a subset of Stable Diffusions training data. And what this training data is, a data is built on a dataset called LAOIN-5B.

And that is… -5B means 5 billion. It’s 5 billion images that are scraped from the web, all different corners of the web, basically distilled in this process we described. Every one of those images and its captions was reduced to noise. The caption was associated with it as text. And the paths that the noise followed as it degraded that image remembered as an algorithm, essentially like mathematical coordinates.

And transfer it into “the model” as possible paths, which sometimes we call the, vector space. 

And so you’re building out these spaces within the model and averaging these things together. 

Mack Hagood: A couple of things come to mind here. One is that there’s this kind of a strange irony that AI relies on noise, which is randomness, and yet the way it uses that noise leads to the most average generic. Images possible, right? 

Eryk Salvaggio: Because your job is to constrain that noise to its average. What is average in that noise. That’s the goal of the system. 

Mack Hagood: And I guess is that why, I might be getting out over my skis here, but is that why they use Gaussian noise? Because Gaussian noise, at least in the sonic domain, is like noise that’s in the bell curve, like the middle. It’s like the average set of noise. It’s, not too high frequency. It’s not too low frequency. 

Eryk Salvaggio: So you’re, structurally, already focused on, what I mean when I say the sort of central tendencies. All of this noise is, mashed together, and when you’re generating, you’re finding this sort of average area in the latent space, and then you’re relying on another thing to confirm that indeed is the thing that corresponds to that, right?

An image recognition system, which we know from all kinds of literature around surveillance and stuff, right? It’s pretty biased. and in this case, we’re talking about a bias towards flower shapes, right? But there’s also biases towards people, 

Mack Hagood: That was the second thing that I was going to bring up is if we’re talking about averages, we’re talking about stereotypes, right?

And this gets us into, the critiques that a lot of people like, Safia Umoja Noble and the book Algorithms of Oppression, like all these different ways that algorithms rely on datasets that reflect the biases of the past, and then they generate these future biases in these future bias outcomes if they’re not critically engaged with. 

Eryk Salvaggio: Absolutely. And so you asked earlier, should we be afraid? I think that this is some of the things we should be thinking about and being critical about. So to take this example, in Dr. Noble’s book, for example, she describes Google search results a couple of years ago, right? And if you did a search of Google for black girls, where did you end up?

The first page of Google search results was pornography, right? Well documented, well researched. And Dr. Noble points this out. And so what does Google do? They changed the algorithm on the back end so that those results are filtered out, right? The thing about it is, that didn’t change the internet.

It changed our access to the internet. And so if you are to look at the training data for these models, and another scholar who’s done great work on this as a Dr. Abiba Barhane, highly recommended. Went in, found all these examples of misogynistic images, racist images, violent images that are in the dataset. 

Mack Hagood: This is the dataset that AI that fed on. 

Eryk Salvaggio: That was used to train this core image generation model of Stable Diffusion and, there’s, trigger warning, but there was also pornographic contents involving children in that dataset, and that was a huge scandal and as it should be. And so Stanford researchers found this content and they had to take it offline.

The entire idea of having a model like this was that people could go in and audit it, right? Look at what was in there, but there was no mechanism for changing it. And so it was a transparency without any kind of responsibility. but the Stanford researchers, because it was open, they were able to go in and find this content, and now we can’t… actually now we can go in, they’ve adjusted this, they’ve cleaned up that data. So now only in the last couple weeks we are actually able to go and look at what’s in the training data again. But every image that’s in there is contributing to the average that we get out of these systems.

So if you are asking for “black girl” for example, you are getting exactly what Dr. Noble warned about years ago. You are getting pornographic images in the training data. There’s other biases as well that are really fascinating, to look at and think about how they come through and what it means for representation in this space of media in terms of who is defining what a person looks like.

So a classic example is also, and I’m sorry that we’re digging into stereotypes, but I really think it’s an important point. That if you ask for a image of a Mexican person, they will almost undoubtedly be wearing a sombrero, right? This is the idea that it has of images that are labeled Mexican.

And person have sombreros on. Less harmful is a example I did live in Australia. What does a typical Australian look like to an AI system? It looks like a koala. It doesn’t even generate a person. It generates a koala. And because, think about the internet, right? And think about this relationship, this information ecosystem that we’re in and reflecting.

We’re taking these biases. If I’m uploading images that I’ve taken on a trip to Australia, I’m usually not saying here’s an Australian person, right? But if I’m saying Australian, it’s usually Australian kangaroo, Australian wildlife. So these associations are in there. Reduced to noise and then re-generalized .

Through this averaging of all these keywords and all the image data that’s been stripped away of any context whatsoever. 

Mack Hagood: The fascinating thing about this to me, or one of many fascinating things is that the data gets generated because what’s happening here is it’s going off of captions of the images, right? And so people are writing and people are going to note a nationality or an ethnicity when it’s the marked category, when it’s the other.

And so you’re actually going to get the perspective of the non- native perspective of Australia. You’re going to get the non- Mexican perspective on Mexico. You’re going to get the non- black version of blackness because if you’re black, it’s not a marked category.

It’s just I took a picture of my sister. It’s not going to be like, I took a picture of my black sister. That is a fascinating and such a glaringly obvious problem that just blows my mind that these tech overlords, never thought about it and/or don’t give a shit. 

Eryk Salvaggio: They don’t filter. A Stable Diffusion did not filter the content. That’s obvious, because we had content that is literally illegal in the dataset. So they were not looking at that. They were not curating that dataset. There was no attention paid to what the data was or how it would structure what resulted what emerged from it when it went through this process of, image generation as a model, right?

When it became a model, there was no thinking about what was going to result from that model. But I think the point is, made that fundamentally without this oversight, without this curation of the data that we use, and especially now that most of the conversation around data is how do we get more of it, right?

That’s what the companies are primarily concerned about. When you get more of it, you will also get more bias. And this is actually the subject of that, paper by Dr. Barhane, if you scale, you also scale hate. 

That’s the, points that Dr. Barhane makes. 

Mack Hagood: So When gave that talk in Poland, you spoke a lot about the difference between a dataset and an archive. And I think this kind of gets to what you’re talking about here. There’s a curatorial responsibility in an archive. There’s an ethics, to how, let’s say, a set of artifacts from that archive are curated in an exhibit

for example. A whole history of people thinking about, people like anthropologists and museum curators and others thinking about the ethics of the archive, especially in relation to our colonial heritage and the ways that things were stolen from, people around the world. None of that ethics of curation seems to be present in these datasets and the people who created these datasets don’t seem to have any concept of this. 

Eryk Salvaggio: There’s a myth, I think I would argue, and myth in the sense that it is a shared belief that informs the way that people work and make and do in the AI space. And right now, this myth… And I don’t necessarily mean it’s false. I just mean it is a shared belief among the people building these things, is that the bigger your datasets, the more you scale the information that you train on, the more I hesitate to say this, because it is true, but I think that it to me, it sounds very silly, but almost the more self aware the model becomes.

In a sense that if you gather enough data, you can start asking the data to curate itself, right? 

This is this idea… 

Mack Hagood: is just the bullshit that they’ve been talking about since Ray Kurzweil with… “We’re just going to get enough computers hooked together that it’s just going to become the singularity and consciousness” it’s like quantity doesn’t scale to intelligence, right? Like these are different things that we’re talking about here.

Eryk Salvaggio: And it is very likely. So scale, we know scale does improve some things, right? But the question is, what does it improve? One thing we have not seen is, that scale reduces the amount of so called “hallucinations”, right? Which is just the machine in, this is an LLMs, right? Large language models. The machines still give bad information. But the argument is that if there’s more data, it’ll stop giving bad information, but we haven’t actually seen that. What we have seen is it gets better at multi-modality, right? I can ask it to turn a white, a physics white paper into a poem, right? It can do that kind of transfer. It can generate more realistic looking text. But ultimately sometimes what it does is generate more convincing texts that’s still factually not referencing the real world, right? It’s not referencing an understanding in any way, because it can’t. Because it doesn’t. But here we’re talking about large language models, which is a whole other can of worms.

But with images to get to this original point, when you’re talking to a museum curator, or you’re talking to an archivist, there is a sense of responsibility. There’s a been a cultivation of ethics, and there’s been reckoning with the failures of those responsibilities and ethics to write, which is really important.

Is that when those things have gone off the rails when, the voice of power is overdetermined what is included in an archive or excluded from an archive, there has been an ability to say, “Shame on you for doing that” With the AI model, who do you point a finger at? It’s almost at this point, you can say, yes, it’s the, people building the dataset.

But they pass it on to the people who are training models on that dataset. And those companies are passing that onto the users who are prompting it irresponsibly. And then the users are saying, “Why are you letting me do this?” and so the blame is, distributed, but I really think that it lays in the foundation of who is gathering this information and who is making the decision to use this information in models that are then being distributed to the general public, right?

That is, there is a responsibility chain there, and we really should be thinking about how do we curate data? And what are the biases of data? But the other problem is you’re not going to solve these issues. You can’t get rid of bias, because there’s always a human making decisions that there are 5 billion images you’re not going to review.

You’re not going to expose to a sort of, auditing process by anthropologists and curators, right? And so there’s some real issues with scale as it applies to this question. 

Mack Hagood: In a moment, I want to switch over to something a little more tightly in the wheelhouse of, this podcast about sound, which is how, what you’re talking about applies to music. 

But first, maybe we can finish up talking about images by, discussing a piece of yours called “Swim”. And again, maybe for the video podcast, we can, put it up on the screen, but, maybe describe it for our podcast listeners, and non sighted folks tell us what this work is and then, and how you’re trying to engage with the issues that you’re discussing. 

Eryk Salvaggio: “Swim” is a nine minute long video piece and there’s three components to it. And so if you can imagine sort of a background, this background is images generated through this glitching process that I’ve described of asking Midjourney in this case, particularly Midjourney. To generate images of noise and actually blending images of noise together, so that what it is trying to do is find patterns in the noise failing and giving me the sort of results, right?

So I’ve taken this failure of the AI system and the result is, in this particular case was a series of, smeary, foggy, almost bubbly looking, digital noise and so this is the background that it’s morphing. It’s, animated.

And on top of that background is an image, I think it’s from the 1920s. it’s an image that comes from the University of Chicago’s video archive of a swimmer. The swimmer is, Ninny Shipley, the film is categorized as erotic entertainment. It is very tame. I don’t want to get the wrong idea of what this video is.

It is a woman swimming underwater, in a bathing suit, right? Full, body bathing suit. And to me, what I’m trying to think about with this process, before I describe what happens in the videos, I wanted to put this image from the archive into dialogue. With an image that was impossible for a AI image generator to generate, right?

So this is the two layers of this piece. and so I took the swimmer and I slowed the swimmer down over the course of nine minutes. And the audio score is also the original sort of jaunty jazz stag party, soundtrack slowed down as well. And it becomes almost, I don’t know. It has this sort of elegiac… 

Mack Hagood: The music’s gorgeous. It’s gorgeous. 

Eryk Salvaggio: I can’t take much credit for it, but it is a slowed down over. So this 1. 5 minute long piece is slowed down to 9 minutes long, including the audio. And then there’s this 3rd layer, That is turning the process of diffusion, into a visual element of the piece. So over the course of nine minutes, what happens in an instance when you’re training a diffusion model is done over slowly.

And so you’re seeing the disintegration of this image, which is an introduction of noise. So you see the image break apart and you see it break apart into static and the patterns of static emerge, that blends the noise of the background with the foreground of the swimmer. And what I’m trying to do in a way, the way I see it, is I’m trying to use AI and the components of AI that are in the process, almost the sort of machinic artifacts the AI produces, for us to have a way of understanding and visualizing what its interaction is with archives and with history, right? That these things that have an individual meaning and context come up against this impossibility of generating, regenerating something that references it, right? There’s no longer a reference when we break something down.

The flower that is generated has no reference to the flower that I have shared online for my wife on valentine’s day, 

right? And that’s a small thing, but there’s bigger things too, there’s history, there’s ways of telling stories that are getting lost in this breakup into noise and separation of image and the labels we assign to image into noise and keywords that gets to, for me, to this distinction between our relationship to something in an archive and our relationship to something that we call a data set. 

Which is that a dataset is a thing. We treat it as one thing, but it is actually multiple things that are comprising it, as opposed to an archive where our attention is, what is the history of the objects in this archive? How is that history being told? What are the connections between these pieces? Not just through a lens of which pixels go next to which pixel, right?

Because we don’t care that there are seven images of people in the archive, right? We care about who those people are and what, part of the story belongs to them. With a dataset in this context, we lose that. They just become the shape of people. And I think there’s some grappling that, we can do about that relationship and that transition, especially as we are generating more and more images based on history that kind of erase history at the same time.

There’s a, almost a duty or an obligation of care to what the sources are that formulate that. 

Mack Hagood: So let’s talk about sound. Let’s talk about, recent work where you’re thinking about, platforms like UDO and Suno. Do you, want to maybe talk about what those are? 

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah. So it’s, very similar. They’re still diffusion models. They’re still taking representations of sound and they are breaking those down. Now, your audience is probably well familiar with waveforms, but you know for those who aren’t it’s the shape of air, right?

Represented visually. That shapes are the vibration of our eardrums, right? This becomes Just the line, in the training process. And this line becomes the thing to find in a solid white wall of waveform data, which is white noise. And so these models, similar to images, are trained to scrape things away in the direction of, say, a snare drum.

So you get the sort of loud spike at the beginning and the trailing away, right? You carve that out of noise. And so in very short time, what we’ve come to see is the generation of complete audio tracks. So this is, these are the tools that we’re looking at. UDO. Suno, and others, there’s many others, and sure to be many more, that are just oriented around producing a track, a full track, and this is the area that I’m starting to look at now with a lot of interest. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Maybe we could talk about your experiments with, this kind of diffusion model created music, which is, you have a track called “Sounds Like Music”. 

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah. So “Sounds Like Music” is a reflection of a lot of the ways that I’ve been trying to play with these models. It’s similar to the ways that I was playing with vision or image models, which is to say, let’s try to figure out what the system relies upon and how we steer that system and ways that we might find glitches or find ways of introducing, unexpected user behavior into the system in order to make music that either reflects the sort of process that it uses to generate the audio or emphasizes to the listener what it is that they are exactly listening to. And so I’m trying to think critically about what I’m making and how I’m making it and sounds like music is basically this, concepts of thinking through what is exactly the thing that we are hearing when we are listening to a diffusion based song.

Because, for the first thing, it’s not meant to be expressive of ideas or emotions the ways that a lot of music might be, particularly pop music, right? What it is designed to be , essentially, is plausible. other words, it has to be generated, passed through something that labels it in the context of yes, this is associated with a waveform data that clusters around this idea of, indie or opera or yacht rock.

And this sounds like yacht rock, this sounds like opera, right? The, waveform information resembles the waveform information common to the keywords that have been given to me, which is the genre tag. . The idea is, it has to be plausible. It has to sound like music. And I think that offers a really, pointed way of engaging with what we’re listening to.

Which is, how does it sound like music? And how might it not sound like music? Because the other thing that’s happening, and I think in this song, you can really pick out, pick it up, is that you are taking an image of white noise, and just like we said before, you can reduce that to the shape of a snare drum.

This is generating an entire track. It’s not generating bass, drums, vocals, and then mixing them. It is one giant wall of noise that is being reduced until more or less it sounds like drums, and bass, and vocals. So it’s all one sound that we are listening to that sounds like music. Now what we’re talking about is essentially really compressed, but even with compression, you’re taking different pieces of sound and compressing them into a single wave.

This thing, those forms of, those like lines of music have never been separate. They’ve always been compressed together, and I think this is a really interesting way to listen to this music. You can listen to this song “Sounds Like Music”. And if I would encourage people, if they do to think about how they’re hearing it in the sense of what is it doing to convince you.

That this is music, that this is plausible, right? How is the system figuring out this is passable as music, but also what does it sound like? What artifacts can you hear? What are the decisions that are being made from step to step in this song to produce it according to this constraint of sounding like whatever this genre of music is. 

Mack Hagood: This is like getting very much into the weeds and, I don’t want to detract. My question… I love what you’re saying. I’m afraid I’m going to detract from it, but I’m just trying to wrap my mind around… so it’s easy for me to picture the generation of a still image, right?

You’ve got this palette of noise, the constraints of the dimensions of the image you want to generate, and then you whittle away from the image of the flower or whatever, right? Video and audio are a little harder for me to wrap my head around. So it’s do you need to know how long the, song is going to be? And by “you” does the AI need to know how long of a track this is going to be in advance? So basically it’s got three minutes of white noise, and then it’s going to sculpt a three minute trance techno song out of it. You know what I mean? 

Eryk Salvaggio: I do. Yeah, you’re, touching a bit on, sound over time, right? The temporality of sound or music in particular, right? And, so there’s, right now, there’s so many different models, it’s hard to give like a one size fits all answer. But what might help is looking at the very beginning of a particular one, which is UDEO and Suno to some degree, right?

So these are the big ones. As far as I’m concerned, that the moments that we’re speaking next week, it might be different, but if you look at the very beginning, what they were capable of doing is generating about a 32 second window and what it would do is essentially it would create this, spectrogram.

And the spectrogram would be a pattern that was associated with 32 seconds of sound because the spectrogram represents sound over time or transitions over time, frequencies and stuff like that over time, you can generate this and then you could transfer that data back by tasting. Okay, this last slice is the last two seconds or whatever, right?

This first slice of the first two seconds and everything in between is distributed evenly amongst that. So you have, an image that is structuring your 32 seconds of sound. Which is what is also really interesting about this current heart of AI is that, it’s an image of sounds that is being transformed to do the sound of sound, 

Mack Hagood: Is AI

better at EDM because the, tempos tend to be more standardized. I find that AI seems to be pretty good at creating a drop, 

do you find that at all? Certainly when it comes to like vocals, everything gets very uncanny and spooky very quickly, which I enjoy. But some of the techno sounding stuff sounds more plausible to use your word than 

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah. 

Mack Hagood: Some more organic music does.

Eryk Salvaggio: I’m speculating, I think a lot of that has to do with the compression, right? A lot of techno is like sounds compressed. They’re using like there’s a noise, there’s an embrace of noise in techno to begin with, to some extent. And the, beat is standard.

I don’t want to, I, don’t want to sound like I’m insulting techno by boiling it down to like standards formulas. But, there are patterns that come, I think, as a result of it being from a machine in the first place. from, the sort of structures of, digital audio workstations.

You have grids that you work with in a, in these things that most people don’t always stick to the grid, but oftentimes, the system is essentially generating the image of a grid. So at the very least, those beats are very simple and it’s identifiable, but I also would push back a little bit on the idea that, I think it’s more plausible sounding, but a lot of the stuff that if you are at the opportunity to adjust what’s called temperature in these audio tracks, the amount of rigidity, is less. Like you reduce the amount of rigidity in the structure, and so you can actually get some pretty wild compositions. But what’s interesting about these compositions is they will still follow, within still I don’t want to say standard deviation, right? But they still cling to the central tendencies.

In the training data. So you can, I call it Deerhoof or Kitsch are the suit to poles. if you’re familiar with the band Deerhoof, they play these like solid rock beats, right? But then suddenly they’ll transform to a techno beat and they’ll be playing jazz over it.

And you can make that kind of thing, but what’s really important distinction is that the machine is not deciding to do that. It is finding sort of the average areas of multiple genres and pasting them together in a way that coheres to the tendencies that have been defined for it in terms of musical structure.

So it’s not creative in the sense that Deerhoof is creative. It 

Mack Hagood: I would say maybe it’s even more like 100 gecs. I don’t know 

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah, that’s another good example. Yeah. Yeah. 

Mack Hagood: I’m a fan of both so I definitely don’t want to besmirch either band by saying they sound like AI. 

Eryk Salvaggio: No, but in a way, what it is getting at is that that’s actually hard for a human to do, right? That’s actually like the sign of a skilled and creative thinker is to think about what your genres are and what those constraints are and how to break them. Whereas what you do with AI is you tell it what the genre is and it tells you here’s roughly, here’s a rough approximation of that genre.

Or you say here’s the genre, but go way out there to these other genres and it’ll find the rough approximation of multiple genres. And then average all of these things together. So there’s no decision making process there, right? It is purely determined by what’s in the training data and how it resembles or how it can be assembled according to prediction.

So it’s, a prediction, right? These patterns of music are studied for patterns because patterns are predictable. And when you ask it to reproduce these patterns, it reproduces predictable patterns. You can assemble those patterns in wild ways, which is where human creativity does come in, I think, but you’re also losing decisions from, moment to moment about what the music is going to do.

So again, it’s about sort of our definitions and our relationships to these things. Like how are we thinking critically about the music? I think as consumers of the music generated by AI, that’s the thing that I want to think about is as a listener, what am I hearing and how do I listen like meaningfully to a piece of AI music that essentially has no meaning.

It’s a reference to the data. It’s a reference to the processes that make it, how do I listen for those things? Which is going to be different from the way you might listen to a piece of music from Deerhoof or 1000 gecs. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Any meaning is going to have to be attributed to the AI generated content by the listener. And so that really, gets us into the questions of what is music for… 

Eryk Salvaggio: And why do we listen?

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Why, do we listen? You use the term hypothetical music. AI is taking noise the noise of human music history, and then putting out some hypothetical offerings for us to do with what we will. In the talk that I saw you give, as I recall, you ended with something of a plea for meaning in this age of noise. And so this idea that we would have to be the ones to bring the meaning to the music, made me think of that. So maybe as we wind down here, can, you talk about how we might restore meaning in an age of noise?

Eryk Salvaggio: My belief is that one of the ways we think about noise is often about how we constrain and control it. And that when we lean on this response to noise, we often encounter problems. Because noise is a part of the world, and it is really the desire for control and definition in response to that noise that introduces, I would say, a lot of problems politically, personally, and socially.

It is not necessarily the noise, but our response to it that creates a lot of these issues, a lot of this, over determination of the possible things that can happen in the world. Because we are uncomfortable by noise. Noise is oftentimes something that we react to out of fear, and so we seek to constrain it.

And AI is a model of that response. It is a desire. It reflects a desire to constrain the paths of possibility to what has come before, to what is in the training data and to predict what might come out of that. If we continued along the lines of the things that have put that day training data together in the first place.

So if you’re generating images, you’re getting stereotypical images. If you’re generating music, you’re getting music that is a reference to patterns found in other music, which was what I mean by the hypothetical. And so what I think is actually the response to noise that we need to embrace is to figure out what are the pieces of the noise, how to hone in on the noise without the elimination of what surrounds it. 

What is the context, right? Because right now, what we’re talking about is noise that is made of overwhelming seas of context, a million points of data coming into us at once. And each of those points of data has a context.

And there’s a difference between saying no, to the noise and engaging with the noise. Through a kind of curiosity and engagement. That says this is a piece of noise among many, and I’m aware of the other noise and I’m not going to say it is invalidated or needs to be eliminated or eradicated, right?

But rather that I am engaging with a single point of noise at this particular time and I’m going to give it my attention and I’m going to understand its context. I’m going to think about how this piece that I’m thinking about be of no as noise is a signal and recognize that these are signals, right?

That all of this information coming at us is signal. It’s just overwhelming, but that we can slow down and we can focus on it and we can think about it at a time, one piece at a time without rushing necessarily to cancel all the other noise out. Because we have to learn to live amongst the noise. We need to embrace the fuzziness that we live in around borders and definitions and categories.

And right now, AI is really rigidly tied to these categories and definitions and keywords, right? And it is shaping noise in a way that is aimed at reduction of noise, as opposed to what really introduces the variety and the diversity of an experience of being alive, which is in many ways noise.

Noise can be a source of joy if we don’t respond to it with panic and a desire to control and shape it into something familiar. What if we embrace that noise, try to understand the context that it comes from and think about what we can do from a position of play instead of fear and control. So I say, let’s think about elevating context.

Rather than enforcing control over the noise that comes into our lives. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah, that’s lovely. And man, does it sound a lot like the argument I’m making in my book that I’m working on right now, like this book that I’m writing about the history and the future of noise cancellation, white noise machines, algorithmic filter bubbles, all of these different ways that we try to control experiences of noise that we experience.

And paradoxically, it’s this desire to control our surroundings that actually makes us most controllable and actually limits our freedom and limits our ability to be spontaneous, and to deviate from past habits and routines on a personal and a historical level. So I couldn’t agree with you more about what you just said.

And I just want to thank you for being on the show. This has been fascinating.

Eryk Salvaggio: Thanks so much. Lovely to be here. And thanks so much for your work. The noise cancellation things are a real part of thinking about this as well. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. we’re, we’ve been like cruising between these different registers of this notorious word noise. But I’m really glad for that sort of multiplicity of noise, because that’s the only way we both wound up at the conference together. So usually I shake my fist at like how, fuzzy it is when people use the word noise.

But in this case, I was like, “Oh…” 

Eryk Salvaggio: I’m trying to embrace that fuzziness!

Right? I think it’s important to have a space of fuzziness. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah, for sure. That, yeah, that was possibility space of noise. 

Eryk Salvaggio: Yeah.

Mack Hagood: All right. Thanks, Eryk. This been a blast.

Eryk Salvaggio: It has. Thanks so much.

Mack Hagood: And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks to Eryk for being on the show. You can learn more about all things Eryk Salvaggio at cyberneticforests.com and click on the newsletter tab to get more of Eryk’s brilliance in written form on the regular with his newsletter, see show notes, links, and more for this episode at phantompod.org. Please remember to subscribe to us and rate and review us in your platform of choice and join us at Patreon. We have free and paid memberships where you can get news and exclusive content like the coming backstory on my deal the Penguin. Thanks to my Miami University assistants, Katelyn Phan, Nisso Sascha, and Lauren Kelley for their help with the show.

And I want to give special thanks to Dylan McConnell, AKA tiny little hammers. Dylan created our logo and he also helped me animate it for the digital video age. You can find his, work at tinylittlehammers.com. Thanks also to Josiah Wolf from the band Y. He helped me spice up our intro soundscape with some modular goodness.

So thanks, Josiah. And the one and only Alex Blue, Blue the Fifth did our outro music. Got some feedback on our video turn. Send it to Mack at Mactrasound. com.

This is a work in progress and, oh, and thanks to my dog Pearl for hanging out in the studio with me today. All right. Anyway, peace y’all. Happy new year. See you next month with Liz Pelly. 

The post Are AI art and music really just noise? (Eryk Salvaggio)  appeared first on Phantom Power.

Today we discuss how narrative podcasts work, the role they’ve played in American culture and how they’ve shaped our understanding of podcasting as a genre and an industry. Neil Verma’s new book, Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession, offers a rich analysis of the recent so-called golden age of podcasting. Verma studied around 300 podcasts and listened to several thousand episodes from between the fall of 2014 when Serial became a huge hit to the start of the Covid pandemic and early 2020. It was a period when podcasts—and especially genres like narrative nonfiction and true crime—were one of the biggest media trends going. At the heart of these genres, Verma writes, was obsession–a character obsessed with something, a reporter obsessed with that character, and listeners obsessed with the resulting narrative podcast.

Neil Verma is associate professor in Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University and co-founder of its MA program in Sound Arts and Industries. Verma is an expert in the history of audio fiction, sound studies, and media history more broadly. He is best known for his landmark 2012 book, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, which won the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Verma has been a consultant for a variety of radio and film projects, including Martin Scorsese’s film Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). In addition to his research, Verma has also created experimental sound recordings for broadcast. His compositions have been selected for several radio art festivals around the world, winning an honorable mention from the Sound of the Year awards in the U.K in 2020.

For a fascinating listener Q+A with Neil, visit patreon.com/phantompower and get free access to this bonus episode in our patrons-only feed.

Finally, we have big news: This will be the final episode of Phantom Power. But don’t worry, Mack will be launching a new podcast about sound in early 2025. To make sure you hear about the new show, receive our new newsletter, and get bonus podcast content in the coming months, sign up for a free or paid membership at patreon.com/phantompower.

Mack Hagood  00:00

Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood. Today we talk with Neil Verma, author of the new book Narrative Podcasting In an Age of Obsession. Neil offers a rich, multifaceted and methodologically creative analysis of the so-called Golden Age of podcasting. And it’s pretty wild how intensively he studied this recent period of history, investigating around 300 podcasts and listening to several 1000 episodes, from between the fall of 2014 when Serial became a huge hit to the start of the COVID pandemic in early 2020. This was a period when podcasts and especially ones in genres like narrative nonfiction and true crime, were really one of the biggest media trends of that moment. 

And we’re going to talk about how narrative podcasts work, the role that they played in American culture, and how they shaped the cultural understanding of podcasting as a genre, and an industry. But first, last episode, I promised you some big news about this podcast. And here it is. This episode is not only our 15th, and final episode of the season, it’s also the last episode of Phantom Power. I’ve been producing this show since 2018, we’ve done over 50 episodes, and I’ve loved pretty much every minute of it. It’s been such a privilege to bring you these amazing guests, forge connections, and help foster a community in sound studies and acoustic ecology. It’s truly been one of the most fulfilling things that’s happened in my academic career. So why am I ending the show? Well, I’m starting a new podcast, it’s still going to be about sound, it’s still going to engage with the theories and practices of sound studies and acoustic ecology and sound art. But it’s going to be a more public facing and accessible kind of show. 

So you know, I’ve had this NEH grant for this year. And while I’ve been producing this show, and writing a book proposal for a trade press book, and while I’ve been doing that stuff, I’ve also been working about 20 hours a week on developing this new podcast. And just like I’m pivoting from writing an academic book to a mainstream nonfiction book, I want to do the same thing here, I want to present a highly polished narrative podcast for the public. I don’t want to say too much more about it right now. But just know that I’ll still be interviewing experts and artists, but the focus will be on telling stories, not in providing a really, you know, long form interview. So in a way, this is going to be getting back to what we attempted in the very early days of Phantom Power, but with even higher production values. I’m a finalist for a New America Foundation Fellowship. So if that comes through, I’m going to put all of those resources into this new podcast. And the good news is, well, actually, I think there are a few good pieces of news for Phantom Power listeners. The first one is that I’m going to do what’s called “feed jacking”. So the new show is just going to show up right here in the Phantom Power feed. So you’re not going to have to go look for it or do anything to get the new show when it launches in early 2025. 

Second, for those folks who are members of the Patreon, I’m going to keep dropping the occasional long form interview. I love Phantom Power for those who want that deeper dive. And I also, I’m going to have a newsletter because I thought I wasn’t enough of a walking cliche by having a podcast, I really needed to add the newsletter component to it. So yes, a newsletter, it’s going to have news about sound original essays, updates on my from my book research, and interviews with sound scholars. And of course, I’ll be updating you on the progress of the new show through that newsletter. If you’re interested in the newsletter, just sign up at patreon.com/Phantom Power for a free membership or a paid membership. And I’ll send that your way. It won’t be too frequent, probably once or twice a month. I’d also love for folks to sign up for a free membership just so that I can reach out this summer with a listener survey.

 I’m developing this listener survey to help me as I tried to figure out this new show and what it’s going to be. By the way, I got a Spotify message from a listener who said they couldn’t find the free option on Patreon. If you just go to the Patreon site, it’s a button right there at the top of the page that lets you join for free. And by the way, at the end of this episode, I’m going to thank by name all of our paid subscribers who have helped support the show this season. One other bit of cool news. 

Some of you may be familiar with the New Books Network. They are a really important podcast network that is distributing and documenting for posterity 1000s of conversations about new books you in all kinds of academic fields, and two weeks ago, they began rebroadcasting all episodes of Phantom Power in order once a week on the new books in sound studies feed, so this is going to take a year for them to release all the episodes week by week. So if anyone is interested in hearing it all again, or telling a friend, just Google new books and sound studies, or hit the link in the show notes. 

And finally, thanks to all of you who got in touch, to let me know how you use the podcast in your classes or in your work as a sound scholar or practitioner, y’all are doing some really cool stuff. And it’s so gratifying to hear how this show plays a tiny part in it. As I go up for full professor, I’m trying to compile a list of how Phantom Power has been used in university settings. So if you’re listening and you haven’t sent me an email, and you have something to add, please let me know. So just email me at hagoodwm@miami.oh.edu That is h-a-g-o-o-d-w-m as in Mack. And thank you. Okay. Wow, that was a lot of stuff. Again, thanks to all of you for listening. I hope you’ll stick around for the new show and also take the survey when I put it out so I can get some feedback in developing the new one. 

Okay, let’s get to it. Let’s talk about our guests. Neil Verma is one of the most innovative scholars I know of working in radio and podcast studies. He’s an associate professor in Radio, Television and Film and co-founder of the MA program in Sound Arts and Industries at Northwestern University. He co-founded that with past Phantom Power guests, Jacob Smith. Verma is an expert in the history of audio fiction, sound studies and media history more broadly, like a lot of great radio and sound scholars. Neil’s from Canada, he grew up in Burlington, Ontario, a small town 50 miles west of Toronto. He’s the son of a half French Canadian half Anglo Canadian school teacher, mom, and a dad who was a scientist originally from India. 

Neil Verma  07:15

He was the only brown skinned paleontologist in Canada in the 60s. And so he spent about 10 years trying to make a go of that and didn’t have a lot of success. So eventually, he kind of quit academia and started a business like a lot of immigrant families do. He started a printing company. And so we had sort of a mom and pop printing company when I was a kid. 

Mack Hagood  07:35

Radio wasn’t an obsession for Neil as a kid, but it was a constant companion. 

Neil Verma  07:40

I can’t remember a time when a radio wasn’t on in my kitchen. So yeah, part of the background texture of life for me when I was a child, but also so obvious, and so present that you don’t think about it. It’s like air. 

Mack Hagood  07:54

Neil got a BA in English from McGill University and a PhD in the history of culture from University of Chicago. He’s best known for his landmark 2012 book Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, which won the Best First Book Award from the Society for cinema and media studies where he is now a board member. By the way, if you haven’t dug into Theater of the Mind, you should really check it out. Even if you have no interest in radio drama, per se. Neil’s analysis of microphone techniques and how mic placement constructs a sense of auditory space is just so detailed and so useful. Neil is such an expert on radio drama that he was brought in as a consultant on Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, you might remember the movie ends in that radio drama segment. And Neil was the consultant that made sure that all of that stuff was historically accurate. So again, Neil’s new book is called Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession. And before we got into the obsession part, I asked Neil to define narrative podcasting, how would he define his object of study in this book? 

Neil Verma  09:09

So it’s both temporally located and structurally designed? Right? So I think that there’s a certain period where narrative podcasting has its most important prominence. And that’s essentially from the first season of Serial in 2014. To essentially now, I feel like it’s kind of at a point where the form has become less part of the center of podcasting as a conversation. The second way I define it is that narrative podcasts in natural language like if you listen to how podcasters describe their work, often what they talk about when they mean narrative is a form of story audio storytelling that oscillates between what we might call like a mimetic scene. So something that they’ve recorded on tape, maybe it’s an interview, maybe it’s an investigation in a certain place. And then something that’s narrated. 

So someone in a studio is talking, reading a script, often to a microphone. And that interplay between those two things is often described as narrative podcasting. Another way of talking about it is scripted podcasting. So podcasters often talk about it as a, you know, there’s one mode of operating, which is kind of like what we’re doing right now, which is talking to one another. Now, obviously, there’s often some scripting, or loose scripting in those circumstances. And then there’s the scripted podcast, which means like you have written it, you’ve edited it, it has a script, it has a text, it has a narrative life outside of that. Yeah. And then there’s a wide variety of ways in which podcasters define this kind of storytelling, often, it’s formulas that were derived from very successful podcasts like This American Life, where they’ll often say that, you know, you have to have a moment of tension, a detail, you have to have a moment of reflection, they’re often there are different formulas that are used to describe that sometimes they use it as physics, they sometimes use the word physics to describe it. 

So there’s a wide variety of definitions out there. I don’t necessarily subscribe to one. I think that narrativity is something that is contested. And its contestation is part of what’s interesting about it. That said, I mean, the podcasts that interest me most are those that have that kind of oscillation that I’m talking about, where there’ll be a scripted part where a person is talking to a microphone. And they’ll also be something that is like a scene or tape to which the narrator is talking. These are usually the podcasts that take the form of history podcasts, True Crime podcasts journalist like long form journalism, or audio dramas. And that’s typically the form they take, they’re generally more expensive to make than chat based podcasts. And, and even though they are a relatively marginal part of the overall podcasting landscape, they tend to have a larger cultural investment in them, for one reason or another.

Mack Hagood  12:19

 Yeah, and I’d like to come back to that in a moment. But maybe just to hold on to this sort of formal definition that you’re giving us here of this, this physics of podcasting, where there’s a sequence of actions, there’s the tape that the producer brings into the studio. But then there’s also the you know, one way I read glass of This American Life, put it as like the anecdote reflection point model, right, where you’re giving us the sequence of actions in in the course of a narrative, and then we pop out of the frame, and we’re back in the studio. And we’re like, why are we talking about this? I believe this has also been called, like the American style. Can you maybe talk a little bit about it? 

Neil Verma  13:03

Yeah, so Shavon McHugh, who started the radio doc review, kind of well known journalism scholar and journalist who makes podcasts as well, she’s a friend of mine. And so she often speaks kind of the American style of narration. An American here should denote something like This American Life, although it also refers to other kinds of shows like Snap Judgment-Radiolab to some extent. 

And this is kind of narrative driven in the sense that there is, the narrator ends up being the main character, it’s often someone who is talking to tape quite a bit, a lot of tape, it’s very framed. And it feels as if we’re on a journey with a journalist who’s trying to find something out. 

Mack Hagood  13:44

And that’s, that kind of brings us to what I think are maybe the emotional tone or emotional stakes of this mode of narrative podcasts, which is there’s a journalist who’s taking us on this intimate journey, there’s something intimate about this genre. Would you agree? 

Neil Verma  14:03

Yeah. The term intimacy is a complicated one to think about, partly because it’s really ubiquitous when people talk about radio of any form. And I think about it because of the way I look, the way I look at objects, like I think of it as an aesthetic, yeah, more than as something that’s innate to the medium. 

When we say intimacy, what do we mean? We mean, we have one narrator, their voice is closer to us than everybody else’s voice. Yeah, we know their name. They tell us their name. And we hear from them a lot. We feel very aligned with them. And those are all aesthetic choices. You know, you don’t have to tell the story that way. And often, that’s just the starting point for the aesthetic of the show. Often, someone, a host with whom we have an intimate connection will kind of pass us off to someone else, or take us through a world in a different kind of way. And so you know that I think that’s one dimension of intimacy. That’s aesthetic. Another dimension of intimacy, that, you know, I think is important. 

And you know, I’ve actually thought of your work a lot in this case is, often when we talk about the intimacy of audio, we’re talking about the intimacy of it, of our own experience of it are kind of like that, we tend to listen to it in headphones, we tend to listen to it through our phone, which is connected to our identity. And so there’s also a kind of like, proximal story to tell about intimacy that isn’t inherent to the medium, exactly. But it is somehow present in the technological configuration that most people experience it in. Yeah, that’s great. Okay, so we’ve thought about the sort of formal characteristics of narrative podcasting, and this kind of construction of intimacy that we sort of take for granted, probably culturally. Another question I have for you is why is this specific sub genre of podcasting, as you said, it’s not even most podcasts? Why does it seem to become synonymous with podcasting itself? 

Like, if you look at just if you just Google the history of podcasting, the first decade of the medium, like, basically, no one talks about it? Like if you look through these histories, they rarely talk about any shows in the first decade, it really all seems to start with this American life, and Serial like in 2014. Why has this genre become sort of definitional of podcasting? It’s largely because of other media. Because of this conversation, the conversation around these kinds of narrative podcasts took place in mainstream media in the New York Times in Vanity Fair in The Guardian. There were parodies on Saturday Night Live. Yeah, that ‘s also it’s experience was trackable. Because these podcasts grew up around the same time as social media. You could argue that one of the most important features of Serials popularity had to do with its relationship with Reddit and the enormous number of conversational threads that took place on Reddit as a result of the Serial serie-ality. So I think there’s a historical coincidence to it, and also a way in which it crossed into certain kinds of publications. It also is connected to prestige, audio work that had been going on in public radio stations for a generation before that. And so the kinds of creators who ended up making podcasts, many of them had cut their teeth on, you know, high end NPR shows that were really well produced and had incredible discipline to them. 

Many of them learn their craft from really excellent storytellers and kind of branched off of that. And then there’s also a part of it that kind of gets into the theme of the book, which is that the structure of a lot of podcasts, meaning how they’re oriented, tends to solicit an obsessive relationship with their listeners. And so you don’t just listen to something and then let go of it. You listen to something and feel called to respond or feel, like enjoined towards a task. You’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to keep thinking about it. And so one of the things that I found in a lot of the press coverage of Serial when it started to come out, was this word obsession, just kept coming over and over and over again, I’m obsessed with this podcast. This podcast obsesses me. And it’s really interesting to me that that’s the framework in which people culturally responded to this particular kind of text. I also think about it in contradistinction to streaming television, which was also kind of mourned at this moment. 

Streaming television, people describe using metaphors of addiction. I’m addicted to this, I’m binging this. But for podcasts, it was more about obsession, it had this more kind of deep emotional monomaniacal relationship. Nobody said that about This American Life. These were shows that were great, and he liked them. But you didn’t have that experience of it. And so that’s one of the things I really wanted to dig into with the book is like, what do we mean, when we use this word obsession? What is it in the text itself? Yeah, that gives us a permission structure to have an obsessive relationship to it. And more fundamentally, what does it mean to have an obsessive relationship to an art object? 

I mean, you’re making this broader argument. And I have to say, I had never thought of it this way. But this concept of obsession really is such a cool unlock on what was going on in this moment, where, like, you’re making this broader argument about the role that narrative podcast played in our like, not just the culture, but sort of the media ecology, at least as I’m reading what you’re talking about. I mean, there’s I feel like there’s the in the book, I kind of give two ways of historicizing. This rise of narrative podcasting and its relationship with obsession, how to intersect one is proximal, so very much A part of the public radio production culture is a fascination with what they often call the interesting. What makes a story interesting is often how you pitch something. It’s not just what happened. What’s interesting about it, is how a lot of people would pitch a story to a show like snap judgment of This American Life or radio lab studio 360, places like that. And the interesting thing isn’t, you know, as a concept, it’s elusive. What do we mean when we say something is interesting? 

Often we mean that it sparks our curiosity, but we can’t say why it stands out. But for reasons that are yet to be ascertained, and then the story often becomes how do we figure out what’s interesting about this story? And so I think that’s part of that’s kind of the proximal cause. But the question of why podcasts became obsessive isn’t just a story about the history of podcasting. It’s also a story about the history of obsession and obsession, as a historical idea that has its roots centuries old in legal and psychiatric and artistic contexts. And often, I lean a lot on Jan Goldstein’s work here, the history of obsession has been involved in boundary disputes, often when you’re trying to figure out what what is the domain of psychiatry, and what is the domain of the law, for example, then the issue of like obsessive thought and mono mania becomes really prominent. And I feel like that’s true here too is that in trying to figure out, you know, what counts as a radio show, and what counts as a podcast, the issue of obsessive thought has this outsized role to play in separating one from the other. So,

Mack Hagood  21:42

Yeah, so obsession becomes, again, maybe touching back on that intimacy that was said to maybe even be like podcasting was perhaps even more intimate, at least as it was constructed than radio. You know, you talked about the very personal way that people would listen to them. And this sort of obsessive nature, it’s something that works inside of the podcasts. Like it’s sort of a trope within the podcasts that somebody is obsessed with something right. And then it’s also something that operates in terms of the listeners relationship to the podcast. And then it also Yeah, became part of a media narrative about what podcasting was and how it was different from radio. Could you maybe unpack that a little bit more? Yeah,

Neil Verma  22:32

I mean, it’s hard. It’s hard to think about the material, like the actual material of a podcast, its relationship to its audience, and also how it’s talked about without this concept of obsession. Yeah, you know, if you listen to a podcast from this period that I focus on in the book from about 2014 to 2020, you know, nine times out of 10, the podcast is going to start in the same way, which is something like dear listener, here’s the story that came up, I came across, and I can’t stop thinking about it. And I think I’ve become obsessed with it. 

And often the obsession is kind of confessed in this negative way. Like it’s a secret, or something that you should be ashamed of. Yeah. And I can’t stop thinking about it. So I’m gonna make this podcast that explores this topic. And maybe it’s a historical topic. Maybe it’s the case of a murderer. Maybe it’s, you know, maybe it’s a fiction podcast in which a character is kind of aping a lot of the same characteristics as an investigative podcast.

Mack Hagood  23:27

Maybe it’s why hasn’t anyone seen Richard Simmons? 

Neil Verma  23:31

That’s a good example, or mystery shows a lot like this Serial is a lot like this anyway, that they start out this way. And the host says, and often like the obsession object can be very trivial, or it can be something that the audience members never heard of. Or it can be something that the audience member thinks they understand, but they don’t understand. 

Anyway, and then the podcast kind of proceeds not just investigating the story, but investigating one’s own obsession with it. And many podcasts in this kind of sub genre. It’s not even exactly a sub genre in this paradigm, they end without a solution to whatever it is, the historical nugget was, but there seems to be a solution to the obsessive relationship to it. And I think that’s one of the things that connects obsession to the structure of podcasting itself. What makes podcasts different from radio shows, they’re longer, a lot longer, sometimes 10 times the length of an ordinary radio show. And so the arc of the story, or the arc of the podcast often follows the arc of the narrator’s obsession with that topic. That’s what gives it a beginning, middle and end that’s often what gives it a cliffhanger. This is true for the first season of Serial, the cliffhanger at the end of every episode of the first season of Serial isn’t a non sighted guilty, it’s will Sarah change her mind about this person. And so it’s really about this kind of interiorized mental churn that we get a vicarious experience of.

Mack Hagood  25:03

It’s just interesting to think about the temporality of this, that the fact that podcasts are not limited by certain conventions of broadcasting certain formats, it didn’t have to be a certain number of minutes long-sort of lent itself to this kind of obsession, you are free to just pursue your passion to the ends of the earth and let it take as much time as it took. Yeah.

Neil Verma  25:27

And you know, and I don’t want to be moralistic about this. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. And an awful lot of podcasts are devoted to subjects that a lot of the journalists who made them had been dying to make for their whole career, and never had the resources to make. Right and so a lot of these are stories, particularly of murders of people of color, or unjust imprisonment, things like that had the podcasting boom never happened would have been left unspoken. And so it’s given an opportunity for a whole lot of hidden histories, particularly histories that had to do with justice issues, to come to the fore. And that’s an incredible benefit of the obsessive and obsessive relationship to an object isn’t like an inferior aesthetic agenda. Sometimes it’s really interesting. 

Sometimes it’s really interesting that, you know, one of the podcasts I like to think about is 99% Invisible, which podcast fans will will probably know is kind of a pioneering podcast in the prestige area, also a lead podcast in the radio topia network, incredible fundraiser lots of good things about this show hosted by Roman Mars. And what that show would often do is they would find some particular object in the world, the shows about architecture, design, the built environment, and maybe it’s a form of concrete, or maybe it’s the one I use in the book is at the escalators at the DC metro, and how each one has been weathered to the point where it makes a different sound. Yeah, so they’ll find some object and then they’ll find somebody who’s obsessed with it. And so the host with whom we have an intimate connection introduces us to the surrogate, who I think of as like the surrogate obsessive who has an obsessive relationship to some object, in this case, the sound of different escalators in Washington, DC. Now, I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of people who listen to this podcast have no interest at all in the sound of escalators in Washington DC. But by virtue of the fact that obsession has been mapped from this one kind of legitimate obsessive into the consciousness of the host with whom we have an intimate connection. And then into our ears. All of a sudden, this feeling of transference of obsession from one mind to another is really vivid and it has a way of making this object enjoyable. 

And then the book I analogize this a little bit to Rene Girard’s idea of mimetic desire, you know, where we desire something because someone else desires it. And we mimic that, that desire in a kind of triangle relationship. Something very similar is happening in podcasts in this period, I find that like, just aesthetically fascinating, and really interesting to track.

Mack Hagood  28:14

So that’s the concept you call mimetic obsession.

Neil Verma  28:18

Yeah. Yeah. So if you imagine, like a typical podcast, like Serial, for example, the first season of Serial, you know, one of the first things that Sarah Kenick, the host says to us is, “I don’t think I’m obsessed with this story. But I am kind of fascinated by it.” And then over the course of it, it feels like an obsession, it becomes very much the idea of it. So often, the host confesses obsession then retracts it right away. But there’s this other configuration, which we find pretty often, which is more triangular. So the host finds somebody else who is obsessed with the subject, and that has a way of ratifying or legitimizing or making it more vivid and interesting. And often those are those that are totally lighter and funnier.

Mack Hagood  28:59

One of my favorite passages in the book is I believe this was in the in the introduction, but he wrote that the age of obsession in podcast media for the American left was the age of conspiracy in social media, for the American right, it is not outside the realm of possibility that an itch, that Serial scratched for one population is the same itch that QAnon scratched for another. And something that this immediately made me think about was, at the same time that this sort of intelligentsia were just basically saying podcasting was synonymous with this kind of narrative podcast, the Joe Rogan show was already well underway and like churning along and really questioning authority in all kinds of ways. So I would love for you to just expand on this notion that maybe these different genres are scratching a similar itch, and where that itch comes from.

Neil Verma  29:59

So one of the pleasures of writing a book, which is different from writing a dissertation, is that in a dissertation, everything is assertion, right? This is, so this is how it is. But in the book, you get to have these phrases where you’re like, maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that, you know, and you get permission to use the word perhaps every now and then. And so this was a real perhaps statement for me. But it’s rooted in something that the book does argue: there’s a writer named Marina van Zuylen who wrote a book about obsession in French literature, and obsession is very common in the arts in French culture. Think of writers like Flaubert or Balzac, you know, a variety of artists from the contemporary period. And one of the things she talks about is that one of the things that monomania, like a monomaniacal relationship to an object gives you is that it gives you a false sense of control over it, that it’s a kind of reaction to the shock of modernity, that modernity inundate you with certain kinds of experiences, and monomania allows you to control it. 

So it kind of takes and gives at the same time, like it feels like a debilitation, but it also feels like a form of power. And so it has that complicated relationship that a lot of kinds of psychic conditions have with the exterior world. And so I got thinking about this. And I started to think a lot about well, what is it about obsession that it gives us like, what does it provide? And I started to think a lot about just the rise of streaming experiences in our lives and kind of algorithmically curated feeds of material, whether that’s through social media, whether that’s through your Netflix account, whatever it is, and how obsession kind of has that same relationship with raw material as algorithmic feeds do. So. If you’re interested in barbarian movies that have wooden machines in them, then if you watch one, Netflix is going to recommend the next barbarian movie with a wooden machine in it to you, because it thinks that’s what you’re into. And maybe you are, I’m not judging.

Mack Hagood  32:02

How did you know?

Neil Verma  32:06

So a monomaniacal thinking process mimics what the algorithm does, right? It seeks more, more of what it already knows, right? it churns through the same thing over and over again. So on the one hand, it mimics that, but on the other hand, it feels like you’re extracting a level of control over that thing, right. So if I’m obsessed with something, that it’s my obsession, it’s personal. To me, it’s specific. And that makes me different from whatever it is, feels like you’re feeding me. So it allows you to have that kind of you sort of mimic a lot of the mediated experiences we already have.

 And also have a feeling of resting control from them, that feels rebellious and nourishing, and a little bit naughty. And I feel like that’s an emotional experience that resonates very closely with conspiracy theories. Obviously, the politics of these things are very different. And there is a reality to which both of them must somehow come to grips. But I’m just thinking about the kind of aesthetic and emotional relationship we have with some of these media. And I’ve seen more similarity than I see difference.

Mack Hagood  33:14

Yeah, and I mean, I think there’s a relation in both cases, to these niche rabbit holes of media that that we’ve been afforded in recent decades, and the sort of related deterioration of trust in authority, Sarah Koenig doesn’t trust the justice system that justice has been done in this case, and she’s going to dig into it. And then there’s also this sort of intensification of individual identity and small group identities as a locus of meaning that I think has really been a characteristic of the early 21st century. These are all aspects of our culture that I think really feed into the This American Life Style narrative podcast, you know, which can be so again, constructed as personal as intimate.

Neil Verma  34:06

Yeah, and, you know, a lot of the criticism that was made of the obsessive style during its sort of heyday. And one of them is that it can be quite easy to make the obsession of the 

story, and not the systematic critique the story. And so you know, a good contrast to draw there is with the in the dark podcast, which investigated a couple of different ones. One was a murder case of young boy. And then the other was a conviction case in where the, the accused guy was, was tried over and over and over again by the same prosecutor. And what In the Dark does is it focuses very much on the work of journalism, and it focuses very much on systematic critiques of bad laws and, you know, bad judicial practices, and bad police practices. And those often for a lot of listeners became kind of the antidote to works that were too obsessively related to their material because they didn’t effectively address systematic critiques that could also be made. So I feel like the fact that that is a polarity at all is an important aspect of, you know, identifying what was it about podcasts in this period that people found so compelling.

Mack Hagood  35:18

There’s another aspect to this, where it’s about the this forward thinking that podcasting is going to be the big new thing. And that somehow this obsession and this narrative obsession tied very closely into that. So we’ve talked about a lot of different levels of obsession, but maybe could we talk a little bit about the tech industry and how this sort of obsessive nature perhaps played into this imagination of the lucrative podcast future?

Neil Verma  35:51

Sure. I mean, so my book is a book about the past. And I really feel that the cultural moment that describes this over, that doesn’t mean podcasting is over, podcasting is going to continue to evolve and take all kinds of new forms and have relevance in a lot of different contexts. I’m not worried about the podcasting industry disappearing in any way, it’s going to change a lot. But that’s how these things go. But I think about one of the things that was sort of a perennial feature of discourse about podcasting from about Serial to about the COVID period was that everyone was talking about it as a brand new thing, that this is an exciting new thing, there’s going to be a lot of money in it. And it’s going to be the future of audio, people were talking about it as a Gutenberg revolution. And there was a lot of really excited rhetoric. So a couple of things I want to do in the book is one to like back off of that excited rhetoric. I think one of the problems that we sometimes have as critics is that we fall for that pretty easily, partly because our interests are aligned with that too, right? We want to be writing about topics that feel fresh and vivid. And sometimes that can obscure a bunch of questions and ideas and properties of a thing. When you think about something as something of the past versus thinking about it as something of the future, it changes. And so I feel like this feeling that I call it proleptic imaginary that everything people said about podcasting, or conceptualism about podcasting was framed by an anticipation of a glorious future that I think that feeling has passed at this point. But the second thing I want to think about that is that proleptic, imaginaries are generative, they make things possible, they make it possible for people to start businesses or to pitch podcasts and get them funded. They make it possible for conferences on the definition of podcasting, they make it possible for a whole kind of flood of expanding thought and rapidly changing concepts of how podcasting should operate as an industry. So having a proleptic imaginary can obscure critical thought, but it can also generate media activity. And so striking a balance between, you know, thinking about those two things at the same time, is one of the things that the book tries to do. This period of podcasting growth coincided very strongly with a whole bunch of other things, the rise of social media, it coincided with the rise of streaming services coincided with the rise of NF T’s and bitcoins and things like that. And a lot of the terminology that was used to describe one was used to describe the other. So there’s a certain effervescence that the podcasting rise partook in at this period. And so that’s something that I want to historicize and to like make into a historical object that we can talk about, and we can think about.

Mack Hagood  38:35

One last question about obsession towards the end of your chapter on obsession, you think about obsession, as a method for the podcast scholar to deploy. Could you maybe talk a little bit about what you were playing with there? 

Neil Verma  38:53

Okay. So this is the weird part about the chapter. So the way I think about podcasts, the way I think about anything, the way I work generally as a thinker, is that I like to zero in really closely on really specific moments. So at the beginning of the chapter, for example, I there’s like one sentence in the first episode of Serial that it’s been 10 pet pages talking about. And then I’d like to zoom out and say, Okay, well here are like 50 other examples of this kind of phenomenon. And here’s how they have different sub variants. And here’s how they evolve over time. And I kind of keep doing that, like I zoom in on something and then I’ll back off, and then I’ll zoom in, I’ll back off. And then this weird thing happens, where I start to think that maybe the cultural phenomenon I’m describing should actually feed back into my methodology itself. So if it’s true that obsessive relationships existed within podcasts between podcasts and their listeners, within the cultural imaginary of podcasting, isn’t it also true that obsessive relationships exist in a critical relationship to a podcast? Because if you don’t do that, then it’s like you’re standing outside of it from a superior position. Even without any involvement in the culture that you’re describing, and that’s just not true, of course, there’s some sort of involvement. So I started to imagine what what would an obsessive analysis of a podcast look like not one that avoids obsession, but actually kind of walks into it.

Mack Hagood  40:16

 And specifically from your subject position. 

Neil Verma  40:19

Yeah. And I think that’s important that it should come partly from the podcast itself, which come from some of its features, some of the things that it foregrounds, but should also come from your own subject position, and something that genuinely you felt kind of stuck to you in a certain kind of way. So for me, one of the things that I found so oddly compelling about the first season of Serial was this little vocal crack that appeared in Adnan Sayyed’s voice. In as voice scholars will know, often we have a chest voice, and then we have a head voice. Sometimes they’re called different things. And then often when you’re speaking, sometimes you can crack a little bit, like, a little bit when you’re kind of passing between one or the other. Often, it’s involuntary, it’s a sound that we associate with a kind of sudden loss of identity, we often associate it with adolescence, and I just can’t unhear it. He uses it in his voice a lot. And so one of the things I thought about, well, what would an obsessive read it one obsessive reading of Serial, from my perspective would be to map out all of those focal cracks, episode by episode, and then to try and do a close reading of them. And to suggest what they mean. Now, obviously, it would be foolhardy to say, well, this is what what Sayyed’s  real character is because obviously, this is an edited podcast. And so the podcasters decided what audio to include what audio not to include. So it’s hard to say, what this person is saying versus what the podcast is saying. But I think it’s it became a useful methodology for me to like unpack particular sequences, I don’t think you can come up with global rules for the series based on Adnan Sayyed’s vocal cracks. But it gives you a different way of reading key sequences, and I think a rich one. So you know, one thing I want to prompt maybe provocatively in the book is to say, maybe there’s a methodology for analyzing obsessive podcasts that embraces obsession, rather than exteriorize it or others it or turns it into an object of ridicule or demystification.

Mack Hagood  42:19

And you go to the extent of using some quite sophisticated digital humanities techniques to analyze sort of like the pitch contours of Sayyed’s voice, could you maybe talk a little bit about the technology you used? And in this deep dive?

Neil Verma  42:35

Sure, yeah. So a couple of years ago, I got a NEH grant with Martin MacArthur, who is a poet and an English scholar at UC Davis and merit studies poet voice, she studies how it is that poets speak and how that speeches is talked about. And so I was interested in radio plays, and she was interested in, in poetry readings. What makes these two things similar is that they’re both performed speech. So the poet has a poem in front of them that they’re reading, a different poet might read it differently. They might write read it and read it a different way. And so we were looking for ways in which we can analyze these in kind of a close reading kind of way, and understand them, you know, like kind of the micro level. So what does that look like? That looks like in her case? Where is the poet pausing? Is the poet pausing in the places where the text would suggest to pause? Are they pausing somewhere else? When a poet is described as monotone? Are they really monotone? Can we actually find some sort of way of analyzing the pitch of each speech act that suggests maybe they’re not maybe there’s some other kind of cultural reason why people are calling them monotone. Often ideas about race and gender come out, when you look at some of this criticism that doesn’t actually comport with the sound of the audio. So anyway, and in my case, I got interested in things like Orson Welles is a well known radio actor, he often plays both villains and heroes, he often plays both narrator’s and characters in the play. And so I was interested in does he talk differently in these different places. So we develop with Robert Akshore and Lee Miller, two scientists at Davis, a couple of different technologies, these aren’t exclusive to these particular technologies. There’s lots of software that does this. And essentially, what it does is it analyzes speech for things like pauses, pause rates, and it generates a pitch tracker. So you can see exactly that vocal crack I told you about. And if you feed the both the text and the the audio into the into Drift, which is what the technology is called, then it will show you exactly how many how many hurts that the jump is. And so it’ll, it’ll help you confirm the things that you’re already here’s, and it’ll also like, give you some sort of basis for describing what that phenomenon is. You know, I don’t think that this is like going to work in every situation for everything. It’s just another tool or another way of thinking about it. And it also does that thing that allows you to talk about, you know, micro moments in a podcast in the same way you could talk about micro moments in a novel or a poem.

Mack Hagood  44:58

Yeah, super cool. One of many moments of sort of methodological innovation in your work. So I really appreciated that. So we’ve really done a deep dive on obsession. That’s actually only one of several themes about narrative podcasting. In this book. I really don’t think we can do justice to all of them. But just briefly, you know, there’s a chapter on the way that these narrative podcasts often call into question how we know things. So sort of these epistemological questions that are characteristic of this genre.

Neil Verma  45:35

The second chapter is about epistemology. It’s a bit more of a detailed argument, but the that one is more like, you know, anyone who studies public radio will know that one of the main things that public radio producers often aim for is the production of empathy, and that a successful radio show is often one that produces empathy, kind of cathartic empathy for the listener. And my view is, is that a lot of podcasts kind of started to question the politics of that, at a certain point, especially around issues of race and gender. And what a lot of these podcasts ended up doing was kind of backing off the optimization of empathy, and got interested in in more something more like epistemology, like how it is, we know what we know, what are the limits to what we can know. And so there’s a bunch of ways in which I describe certain patterns of that. And often they have to do with issues of wide variety of issues. But you know, things like racial justice, for example, what is the knowable in certain cases, and some of them can be quite nihilistic. Some of them end up in places where they feel like nothing is knowable. So that chapter kind of focuses mostly on epistemology. And then the third chapter focuses mostly on audio dramas, and how this funny thing about audio dramas history is that it’s always kind of obsessed with memory. So many of these plays are about memory and remembering, and forgetting and amnesiacs, and all these kinds of things. And yet, the form of audio drama historically has no memory of its own. The distinction I like to draw is between something like the lyric poetry, right, if you’re a lyric poet, or say portraiture, so if you’re a lyric poet or a portrait artist, you have to study the whole history of lyric poetry, or portraiture, you don’t even have anything that anyone would find legitimate to say. Audio drama is the exact opposite. Like the vast majority of audio dramatists do not study its origins, right. And in some ways, that’s great. Like that’s actually incredibly makes it liberatory. It means it’s much more inclusive than other kinds of of art forms. But it also creates this like weird relationship with the past, where it’s always kind of reinventing the past. And it’s kind of obsessed with the past, but also disavowing the past. So I call that an aesthetics of amnesia. And I talked about podcasts like The Shadows by Caitlin Prest and Homecoming, as good examples of this. And then in the end, there’s kind of a coda where I have a bit of a moment where this was originally going to be a whole chapter. But I felt like it could be actually just a CODA, which was, you know, in the 2010s, we are always talking about this internet based podcasting as a form. But this was also like an era of the renaissance of of radio arts and people who are intervening in the electromagnetic spectrum itself. And so I talked about a few artists who are very much outside who will make work that you would never describe as a podcast. But were able to kind of ask questions in ways that were in some ways more interesting and exciting and insightful than podcasters could ask. radio artists are obsessed with, you know, emplacement and materiality and the structures of media around us. And this is something that podcasters tended to ignore, there aren’t a lot of podcasts that kind of exploit the architecture of their own possibility. But that’s all that radio artists did. So I find that that distinction kind of interesting, and also productive of a possible future for podcasts.

Mack Hagood  48:45

Yeah, that’s great. So the book is Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Bbsession, and it’s a great read. You really do come at this from so many different angles. Neil, thanks so much. This has been a blast.

Neil Verma  48:58

Yeah, it’s been such a great conversation and I appreciate you giving me such a chance to talk about my work here. So yeah, I love the pod and I’m really excited to be on it.

The post Podcasting’s Obsession with Obsession (Neil Verma) appeared first on Phantom Power.

Today we feature the first episode of a new podcast called Lowlines, which follows host Petra Barran as she travels solo through the Americas, meeting people with profound connections to the places they’re from.

This episode takes place in New Orleans and focuses on Second Line, the brass band tradition that comes out of Black funeral processions and social clubs and is known not only for the power of the music but the for the amazing dancing known as footwork that goes on as the people parade down the street. Petra also talks to Jarrad DeGruy a young fantasy author, designer, dancer, and visual artist from New Orleans. Petra and Jarrad have a probing conversation about footwork and Black New Orleans culture that opens out into a discussion of race, colonialism, and ecology–all the traumas, injustices, and challenges that that are inextricable from the joy we see and hear in New Orleans music culture.

Subscribe to Lowlines, produced by produced by Social Broadcasts and Scenery Studios.

The post Second Line: Footwork in New Orleans (Lowlines by Petra Barran) appeared first on Phantom Power.

There are sonic experiences that can’t be contained by the word “listening.” Moments when sound overpowers us. When sound is sensed more in our bodies than in our ears. When sound engages in crosstalk with our other senses. Or when it affects us by being inaudible. Dr. Michael Heller’s new book Just Beyond Listening: Essays of Sonic Encounter (2023, U of California Press) uses affect theory to open up these moments. In this conclusion to our miniseries on sound and affect, we explore topics such as the measurement and perception of loudness, the invention of sonar and the anechoic chamber, and Heller’s critique of the politics of silence in the work of John Cage. This interview was a blast–Michael is a great storyteller and we had a lot of laughs. 

Dr. Michael Heller is a musicologist, ethnomusicologist, and a jazz scholar. This fall he will join the musicology faculty of Brandeis University as an Associate Professor, after working for ten years at the University of Pittsburgh. Michael’s love for music began with playing saxophone in his youth, but his path took an academic turn during college at Columbia University. There, he dove deep into jazz history while working at WKCR radio under the mentorship of legendary programmer Phil Schaap.

Michael’s scholarly pursuits were further shaped by his work with the Vision Festival, an avant-garde jazz festival in New York. Inspired by the experimental musicians he met there, he wrote his first book, Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s (2017, UC Press), documenting the 1970s scene where adventurous artists staged performances in old factory spaces. Through his immersion in these innovative communities, Michael developed a keen interest in the borderlands between music and sound. 

Just Beyond Listening pushes out into the borderlands of sound itself, using affect theory to probe how sound is perceived in other parts of the body, how sound interacts with written text, how it’s weaponized by the military, and how it can haunt us in mediated form.

To hear the extended version of this interview, including a segment on Louis Armstrong and Miachel’s “What’s Good” recommendations, sign up for a free or paid Patreon membership at patreon.com/phantompower.

See also: 

Part One of this miniseries on sound and affect: Noise and Affect Theory (Marie Thompson).
Mack’s own audio essay on John Cage and the anechoic chamber.

Mack Hagood  00:00

Hey, everyone, it’s Mack. Before we get started, I have a quick request. I am going up for full professor and this podcast is going to be a part of my argument that I’ve been making a scholarly contribution to my field. And part of that argument will be that people are using this podcast in the classroom. I’ve had a lot of people tell me that they use episodes of this show in their classes. 

I’m asking right now, if you could just send me a quick email if you are such a person who uses Phantom Power in any kind of educational setting to teach anything to anyone as a kind of homework or what have you. If you could just send me a quick email. Let me know any details. You’re willing to share your name, your university’s name, the name of the class, You know, maybe how many years you’ve used it, as few or as many details as you’d care to share, I would be so grateful if you could just take that time. I know everyone’s super busy.

 But it would be great for me to have that information. As I go up for full professor. You can reach me at [email address]. Thanks so much. 

Introduction  01:24

This is Phantom Power

Mack Hagood  01:50

Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a podcast about sound. I’m Mack Hagood. Today, we conclude a mini series on sound and affect. Our guest today is Michael Heller, a musicologist and ethnomusicologist at the University of Pittsburgh, and author of the new book Just Beyond Listening: Essays of Sonic Encounter. 

Two weeks ago, Marie Thompson and I walked through Spinoza and Deleuze’s theories of affect and discussed how those theories can give us a different understanding of noise. Beyond the aesthetic moralism that tends to portray noise as something inherently bad and harmful, or something inherently transgressive and revolutionary. Our perception of noise or any sound is never purely the result of vibrations in the air, nor purely the result of our culturally conditioned ideas about sound. Noise emerges in the feedback loops that occur between the material and the social. 

And speaking of feedback, we got so much positive response to that episode, we got a whole lot of new patrons, who signed up either as free members or paid members to hear part two of my interview with Marie Thompson, in which we discuss tinnitus and an effect. 

Today we are building on those episodes with this fascinating interview with Michael Heller. Michael’s love for music began with playing saxophone in his youth, but his path took an academic turn during college at Columbia University. There he dove deep into jazz history while working at WKCR Radio under the mentorship of legendary programmer Phil Sharp. Michael’s scholarly pursuits were further shaped by his work with the Vision Festival, an avant garde jazz festival in New York. Inspired by the experimental musicians he met there, he wrote his first book Loft Jazz, documenting the 1970s scene where adventurous artists stage performances in old factory spaces. Through his immersion in these innovative communities, Michael developed a keen interest in the borderlands between music and sound. And his new book, Just Beyond Listening: Essays of Sonic Encounter pushes out into the borderlands of sound itself, using affect theory to probe how sound is perceived in other parts of the body, how sound interacts with written text, how it’s weaponized by the military, and how it can haunt us in mediated form. In this interview, we discuss topics such as the measurement and perception of loudness, the invention of sonar in the anechoic chamber, and the politics of silence in the work of John Cage. 

This interview was a blast. Michael is a great storyteller, and we had a lot of laughs. And I asked Michael Heller to start off by telling a story that appears in the opening of his book, one that I found completely hilarious, but also, I found it to be a really powerful example of what Michael Heller calls a sonic encounter.

Michael Heller  05:02

So I was in Paris in 2007. And I was there, I was a grad student at the time. And I was privileged enough and lucky enough to get a fellowship to do an intensive language study. So I ended up spending a lot of my time just sort of walking around the city and exploring and seeing what I could. And so one day I’m doing this, it’s a sunny afternoon. It’s gorgeous outside, and I accidentally stumbled across Notre Dame cathedral. And it’s immediately familiar, because we’ve all seen a million pictures of Notre Dame. 

So I say, Okay, let me go over and check it out. And it’s a lot of it is what you’d expect. It’s a very touristy area, there was sort of a concrete pavilion in front where some people are waiting in line, and some people are having picnics. And there’s some low hedges, where there’s a man feeding birds, you know, songbirds, they’re all very, very pleasant. I’m sort of very pleased that happened across this. And after a couple of minutes, it must have been the top of the hour because the Notre Dame bells begin to ring and they start and I sort of think, well, this is lovely. What else could you ask for? I’m a tourist in Paris, it’s a beautiful summer day, I’m gonna hear these bells. And I don’t know anything about the Notre Dame bells. At this point, I’m a jazz historian. 

This isn’t my area of expertise. But you know, I think I’ve heard church bells and know what to expect, there’s going to be some vocation of divine consonance and harmonic confluence and like a lovely pleasant thing to listen to, and sort of sort of sit back and getting ready for it. And as the bills begin to build, what I find is that the Notre Dame bells in 2007 were not that at all. They were very untuned in a certain sense, at least from from a Western perspective, which I much later learned was a criticism that people had, there were a lot of people that couldn’t stand the Notre Dame bells, and they replaced most of them later on in 2013. But at the time, it starts to build and there’s just this dissonance and this accretion of sound that sort of grows into a roar around me. And it takes me by surprise, I’m off guard, it’s incredibly loud, it sort of fills up everyone’s had that experience of having a body filled up with sound, and I’m feeling it in my chest and my teeth. 

And I’m trying to make sense of it. And, you know, I find myself thinking through like, Well, maybe if this is a religious evocation, it’s supposed to be like an angry old Testament God or something like that. I’m trying to make sense of it. But it’s really kidding me. You know, it’s, it’s getting me. And just as it sort of hitting its height, and I’m grappling with this, there’s this other layer that enters which enters as this rush of air and this flap of wings. And I look up and everyone’s ducking down, and the songbirds that were being fed on the hedge there have all taken off at the same time. And I look at the hedge where they were, and there’s this bird of prey, which now I think is a kestrel had swooped down at the moment when the bells were their most intense, and I assumed the birds were distracted, and has pinned a songbird down to the end is ripping it limb from limb.

 And I just don’t know what to do. The bells are still going and I’m dizzy. And there’s this murder taking place next to me. And after a few minutes, it picks up the bird and it flies off to eat it wherever it wants. And eventually, the bells sort of slowly subside, the process goes in reverse. And I’m just sweating like I just don’t know what to do. I’m short of breath and I have to sit down. 

Mack Hagood  08:49

Well, one of the things that you mentioned in the book is, you know, when you have a dissonant set of bells like that, it creates what’s called beading, where the frequencies of the waves don’t line up. And they are especially if they’re very close to each other but not the same. It creates this sensation that you can feel I mean, I’ve gotten to gamelan performances in Bali and experienced this where they use this as an effect, you know, Some theorize it really creates trance states, especially if there’s enough of a sort of cultural priming for that experience happening. And I definitely felt pretty tripped out with some of these lower frequency beating waves going through my body. And so it’s such a multi sensory and really quite violent experience that you had a lovely afternoon in Paris.

Michael Heller  09:44

Yeah, exactly. And you’re right. It is the same experience as Balinese gamelan. And yeah, that feeling of it just the way that it shakes your body, especially not being ready for it. Yeah, it was. It was something. 

Mack Hagood  09:55

So you have a sort of thesis in the book and you have the idea that it’s very affects oriented idea of sonic encounter, I mean, the experience you had there in Paris, listening doesn’t begin to describe it. Right? That’s right. Yeah. So can you talk about this concept of a Sonic encounter? And what you’re seeking to include that listening seems to leave out?

Michael Heller  10:21

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and you put it exactly right, which is that, you know, I was walking away from that I don’t feel like I listened to the bells, right, it doesn’t seem like not in the sense that we usually use the phrase listening at some sort of detached understanding that we take our subjectivities to hear sound from the outside and place it into a context and so forth. This was much more like an encounter, like I said, where this Sonic body had accosted me. And I was being touched by it and sort of grappling with that moment of touch, which is where affect really becomes an important touchstone. 

Now, this doesn’t mean it’s solely a vibrational process. And that’s important. And it’s important to the way that I use the anecdote in the book too, because I’m very much from the more cultural studies oriented side, the auditory culture side of sound studies where that experience that I had was affected at every layer by the experiences that I brought to it, right, everything from my own privileged identity as a white male tourists going through Paris and sort of enjoying a sunny day free of cares, to the moment when I start thinking about an Old Testament God and trying to place it in that context, that’s tied in briefly to my own background as a lapsed Catholic, every layer of it is is inflected by every other layer. And that’s where I find an effect to be a useful paradigm. 

And I know there’s a lot of different theories of affects that float around in the academy. But the place where I find it particularly useful as the moment where intensities transfer across boundaries, where sounds are rubbing up against memories, or rubbing up against texts. And this sort of becomes a theme throughout the book, because there’s a lot of listening in the book. Strangely, it’s not when I say just beyond listening, I’m not discarding, listening, I’m sort of talking a lot about the things that are just on the other side that listening is touching and pushing against. Yeah, and in our previous episode is our interview with Marie Thompson. Yeah, who I know, is someone that you cite in your book, and Maria, and I really got into talking about effect theory, and especially the sort of Spinozan strand of affect theory, and one of those pieces that maybe doesn’t get highlighted quite as much, especially in some critiques of an affect, that maybe consider it to be just this material resonance is that Spinoza also talks about affection ideas as a kind of part of the affect process. 

So yeah, there’s this cycle between the sound waves hitting us in the material of the as Spinoza would put it the body of the bell and affecting the body of the listener, although kind of a lacking term there for what you went through there. But then also in that moment of subjectivity, all of these other affection ideas about what you think you’re being affected by, yeah, also become part of that process. So it’s a socio-cultural material process of affection. Yeah, Most definitely. And you’re right. I’m a huge admirer of Marie Thompson’s work. 

Mack Hagood  13:34

And I think it’s really nice that we have the two of you back to back, because I think we can continue to sort of develop some of these ideas about sound in affect. 

Michael Heller  13:43

Absolutely. Yeah. I would add to that that one thing that interests me, particularly I’ve one chapter in the book about opera supertitles, is the notion of texts as being a part of that ecosystem of that. Yeah. Because I think often there’s a tendency to think of text and discourse as something that’s separate from an effect or embodied experience. 

And I’m fascinated by moments when something that you’ve read or something that you are reading at that moment, changes that moment of encounter. So in the supertitles example, for instance, I dig into a lot up to this moment when supertitles were first released, and it made a small sort of elitist subset of the upper gun community incredibly angry. Yeah. And the crux of that anger. I mean, there’s a lot of gatekeeping and racism and classism embedded in that. But at the same time thinking through supertitles in terms of what it means to have a text that’s treated affectively, right, that’s placed into the performance space, it encounters your body at the same time and in close interrelationship with your experience of listening and hearing. 

Mack Hagood  14:53

And so it’s like what Deleuze and Guattari say in One Thousand Plateaus. We don’t want to talk about what a text represents. We want to talk about what a text does, right? Like what it enacts and superimposing a text onto that space of operatic performance is doing things right. Yeah, necessarily changing your perception and reception of the sound. So those people while they might have been snooty, they also weren’t wrong. 

Michael Heller  15:21

Yeah, there’s that thing and sort of dealing with that. Because you’re right. It’s a very, like, literal application of that text. Yeah, yeah, it does to you.

Mack Hagood  15:29

Yeah, absolutely. Well, maybe we can talk about the first section of the book. Because when you’re thinking through this idea of Sonic encounter, one of the things that I see you doing is trying to explore what are the boundaries of that if we’re talking about things that go beyond listening, maybe we should think about the very loudest experiences that we can have, or the very quietest experiences that we have. So the first chapter explores extreme loudness. 

And you are sort of looking at the historical events that gave us a scientific understanding of what loudness is, right? And then I love moments like this, where we can think about the sort of etymology or history of just these basic concepts that we take for granted. So I was really excited to read this part. Can you talk about where this scientific concept of loudness comes from? And then maybe we can talk about what you do in the second half of the chapter, which is think through the artistic expressions of loudness and what loudness sort of does to us within culture?

Michael Heller  16:40

Sure, yeah. So the article, well, the chapter begins. This chapter, by the way, is largely a reprint of my article from 2015 on loudness. And it begins with a physicist named George William Clarkson Kaye. Well, I’m actually interested to hear from you because I understand you’re working on something else that came from another direction. So I want to hear your work, too. But Kaye was connected to these streams in the early 20th century of noise abatement activism.

And this is something that’s talked about a lot in Emily Thompson’s classic book, the Soundscape of Modernity, for instance, activists who thought that the growth of industrial technology was creating these noisy environments that were disrupting life in one sense or another. So a lot of the measurements of loudness that we use today, like the decibel, have their origins in this movement, where there were these activists who explicitly wanted a way to measure loudness. So they could say, you know, look, we need to legislate this, because I can show you on a scale, that this space is this loud, and it’s harmful in these kinds of ways. 

So where I begin is with Kay giving a presentation where he unveiled this diagram. And I’m not entirely certain if it is the very first use of a diagram like this, but it’s certainly an early use. And it struck me because it’s a diagram that you can still find in physics books that I’ve remembered coming up with in college. And it gives on a vertical scale, sort of different levels. He wasn’t using decibels, he was using another unit called the phon and sort of saying, All right, well, that 20 phons, here’s a sound that you could hear at 40 phons, here’s another sound you could hear and so forth. But when you look at this diagram, the rhetorical underpinnings of it are really clear. Because the lower levels though the ones that are deemed acceptable to Kaye are very domestic calm things, that quiet conversation, and I forget what’s there, a residential street? Yeah, suburban trains, things like that.

Mack Hagood  18:42

Tearing paper, picking up a watch, right?

Michael Heller  18:46

But then when you get to the top, it sort of looks like a thermometer. And when you get to the top, that thermometer literally turns black in the diagram. And all of a sudden, all of the sounds are like threats. There’s a door slamming. There’s pneumatic drill stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And you know, and it’s never something pleasant in the higher realms. 

And this, it’s not like your aunt’s retirement party or climax of a symphony. Like there’s no pleasurable loudness in this diagram.  And the other part that strikes me about it, which continues to be reproduced, are the limits of this diagram, that even as they’re trying to quantify things, when you look at the bottom and the top, the bottom is called the threshold of silence, or I think it says near threshold of silence. And then the top is the threshold of pain. Yeah, and that’s, that is fascinating to me that even at this moment of intense quantification, the upper limit brings the body back in in this tortured kind of way. That was sort of the jumping off point for the teeth. Yeah,

Mack Hagood  19:57

yeah. I love thinking about that. These boundaries, I mean, the way you put it in the book was loudness, a fundamental parameter of sound itself that exists as a continuum bounded on either side by silence and pain, right. And that really gets at the beyond just beyond listening sort of thing here, right like that we cross over into something that we would not think of as acoustic or auditory, which is pain. Yeah. And yet, there’s a lot of like, if we delve into the auditory system, as I’ve done through the lens of tinnitus, and its treatment, tinnitus and pain function very, very similarly. It’s like they’re pretty hard to distinguish between one and the other when it comes to certain types of measurements that people would do in a neurophysiological way. 

Yeah. And so again, we get back to this idea that these boundaries that we make, and particularly as sound scholars, we tend to isolate sound as the object of our study. But sound is multimodal, it’s affective. It’s crossing boundaries between different senses, at least as described by Kaye. Yeah.

Michael Heller  21:14

Absolutely. With you. Yeah. So you just mentioned in the email that you were working on something with Kaye, what’s your project? Well,

Mack Hagood  21:22

I haven’t really zeroed in on Kaye very much yet. I mean, I’ve been very interested in the exact same diagram that you describe, because we’ll see this diagram in psycho acoustics textbooks, but we’ll also see it in the training of audiologists. And so this is a really important understanding of from my perspective, what I’m thinking about with this book project is a little bit more about noise, right? So one way of defining noise is as excessive loudness or you know, loudness moving through this continuum towards pain or into pain. So, there are other ways that noise has been scientifically defined, and I think you actually, if I remember correctly, you mentioned you know, a periodic wave, when Herman Von Helmholtz described, which is basically, the sound waves that don’t line up harmonically. The way music does that there isn’t this kind of rough random stochastic sort of look to the wave. That’s sort of another definition of noise.

 And there, there are different definitions of noise that we can talk about. Marie Thompson, obviously talks a lot about this, and in her work as well. So that’s my, that’s sort of where I’m just touching, maybe lightly on Kaye, as I write this sort of more public facing book. And in my own previous book, I kind of tried to avoid using noise as an analytic because I wanted to see how we could do sound studies and bracket noise? And how could we do media studies and bracket information?

Can I come up with a you know, and so affect kind of became my model of trying to think in a fresh way didn’t just take these two concepts that we all write can kind of dull us down a little bit because there’s so commonplace, but other people, you know, like, Marie, and you know, are using the concept, but they’re really interrogating it deeply, which I think is also helpful.

Michael Heller  23:26

Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, fascinating. I’m looking forward to it. Yeah.

Mack Hagood  23:30

So that’s the loudness defined. That’s the new measure of loudness that we got from Kaye. Can you talk about these? You call them loudness effects, right. So this gets a little bit more into the sort of culturally situated phenomenology, the experience of loudness? What did you find when you started thinking about that?

Michael Heller  23:52

Yeah, well, sort of the place where this began was to sort of think about this almost from a musical standpoint. I mean, I think that actually the approach that I took is informed by my background as a musicologist. Because I remember reading in various places, you know that and again, this is like, Intro Music textbooks, that musical sound you can think of as pitch rhythm, tambor and loudness, right? In European and American musical culture. 

There’s very much a hierarchy among those right where there’s a lot of musical liturgical literature on harmony and pitch. There’s some but much less on rhythm. Yeah, there is very little on tambor and I didn’t know anything at the time on loudness. Yeah. So I wanted to try to think through in the early stages of this project, what becomes pleasure, a little bit loudness. And I think this is this is different from some writings on loudness. It’s because there’s, you know, as you know, from your tinnitus work. There’s a lot of literature about the dangers of loud sound. Yeah, and how it can affect our bodies and create problems. 

But there was less From what I could see about why do people seek these sounds out in the first place, and I truly believed and still believe that people in certain musical communities do seek out loud sounds. So I started to try to think through what are those loud sounds doing? And why? Why are people seeking them out in some cases, and then in other cases shying away from them. So one of them, I’m gonna go in a different order than I do in the book. But one of them I talk about is imagined loudness, which is sort of moments when we can take one sound and imagine it at a volume level that’s different from what we’re experiencing. And so an example of this in one direction could be like, if you’re softly listening to heavy metal, right?

 You’re you’re on a subway and you have it sort of low in your headphones, and you’re sort of you know, whispering along to it. You might have it at a subway is a terrible example, because that turned on headphones. But let’s say you’re listening to it softly, you might still be imagining because you hear the distorted guitars and you hear the drums imagining this, like, arena filling sound, right? Yeah. Whereas on the flip side of that, if you listen to someone like Billie Holiday, or Miles Davis, right, yeah, who are known for these very soft tambours that were enabled by the development of microphones, right? Like, yeah, the difference between Billie Holiday singing and Bessie Smith singing and in some ways is that Billie Holiday is is using the microphone so that she can sort of whisper and have these these little moans and little bends and subtle things that we associate with intimacy, right? It’s like someone’s whispering in our ear. And yet it’s amplified to a point where it can fill up a nightclub or a room.

Mack Hagood  26:40

The perception of loudness independent of the actual volume of the sound is fascinating as a production technique, right? Like I, I went to grad school at Indiana University and Harris Berger, was around and he was doing research back then on the perception of heaviness. And he wound up writing a book I don’t know if you ever saw this book is called Metal Rock and Jazz Perception in the Phenomenology of Musical Experience. And yeah, really, he was the first person that got me thinking about that perception of like, well, what does make a guitar tone heavy, it’s one of those things like, pornography, I know it when I hear it, you know, like, I know, that’s heavy, but I have no idea why. And he really got me thinking about what creates heaviness and, and part of it seemed to be this creation of the auditory effects that happen when either a speaker is over driven, or your actual auditory system is over driven. There’s a kind of distortion that can happen.

And actually, it’s interesting, because sometimes I find, I work out at a place that plays like really loud, hip hop. And then there’s also somebody with a mic on, you know, attached to their head. He’s shouting directions at us as we work out. And I actually find that I can understand the instructor better sometimes if I use earplugs, because my auditory systems actually just getting overloaded by the volume. And I can’t understand the words as well. And occasionally, I turned down the volume, you know, and that’s a counter intuitive, affective loudness. 

Yeah. But I think it’s one that we know on a kind of embodied level. And so when we hear an approximation of that, like a kind of distorted tone, it resonates as loud even if it’s quiet, if it’s well produced. Yeah,

Michael Heller  28:39

I agree with that. I agree with that mostly. And I think there is that sense of, I think I call it inertia, where if we’re used to hearing something in a loud context, and then we hear something that’s tambor-ly similar in another context, we continue to imagine it as loud. But the only place where I would hesitate with that is that I do think there’s a cultural component to it as well and a disciplined component to it. And you know, one example, a sort of innocuous example that I give in the book is if we’re thinking of an artist like Jimi Hendrix, right, yeah. 

And let’s imagine you have somebody who was at Woodstock with Jimi Hendrix in 1969. And so later on in their life, they can listen to a recording that very low and it sounds very, it still sounds loud to them, right? But on the other hand, if you take maybe that person’s children, and their reference to Jimi Hendrix, might be, oh, this reference to mom and dad listening to this on the car radio on a trip, right, all of a sudden, that’s a different kind of association that is connected with probably a lower volume level and then also sort of soft, friendly domesticity as opposed to like big rock insanity. 

And I think where this comes into play a lot too is in you know, people like Jennifer Ackerman’s work on on ratio of associations of sound and sort of the way that it can create really problematic sorts of power relationships and hierarchies. A lot of them are rooted in both tambor and volume in ways that can get really complex. 

Mack Hagood  30:12

Yeah, that’s a really good point and it speaks to the interplay between the cultural and the material. And you know, there’s a lot of more current ways of thinking about phenomenology, queer phenomenology, crip phenomenology that take into account the situatedness of the listener of the experience, or I keep trying to grasp for a different word besides listener, talking to you.

Michael Heller  30:37

This was me throughout the book process, so it’s like “I can’t say listener”, okay,

Mack Hagood  30:43

So these different kinds of of loudness a ffects, then you talked about this one effect of perception of loudness, even in a place where the amplitude is not high. Can you talk about, you know, briefly what some of the other ones are?

Michael Heller  30:58

Sure, yeah. So the other second one I’ll mention is what I call listener collapse, which is an experience in which it feels as if the boundaries between sound as an exterior source and your body as an interior entity, are breaking down. So the most direct examples, you know, if again, going back to the the Paris example, where it feels like sound is suddenly resonating in your body, and you’re one with the sound, at times this often, you know, going back to the idea of high volume as pain, it can become intertwined with that experience of pain, particularly if you look at things like Sonic torture. 

You know, I think there’s a close connection to what people like Elaine Scarry write about in terms of torture as this attempt to have the tortured person break down and not understand themselves as a complete being. But on the other end of the spectrum, again, it’s also something that in heavy metal communities, for instance, people really seek out that experience of feeling connectedness with sound with the artists and sometimes with one another within a room. 

Mack Hagood  32:05

And something maybe like Dave Novak talks about with noises, right? This overwhelming of the ego, right through this sheer force of what’s happening. And again, you know, that’s the experience of an enthusiast in that space. Somebody else might have a different experience of that loudness.

Michael Heller  32:30

Exactly. Yeah, it’s the same same sort of thing. And again, I’m always trying to be sensitive to the fact that what for one subject can be very pleasurable for another can be intensely painful or harmful.

Mack Hagood  32:43

Yeah, yeah. Anything else you want to relate about that chapter?

Michael Heller  32:48

Well, the last one, I’ll just touch briefly on the the last affective, that’s what it called noise occupation, which again, sort of talks about systems of power, be the government’s or be the resistance movement, sort of using noise as a way to claim space. And then I go through some examples where I tried to apply these models, these these loudness effects to some other theories. But yeah, really, it’s it’s not an attempt to be comprehensive whatsoever. It’s really just an opportunity to grapple with the way that loudness and flex our experience in ways that we may not think about. Yeah,

Mack Hagood  33:20

Lovely. So the next chapter sort of does the same kind of work follows the same method, but it’s dealing on the lower end of Kaye’s sclae. So I really like your research here about World War Two, the different labs at Harvard that were trying to operationalize echo. And what we might call anecho, or the lack of echo, or the lack of resonance, or, you know, silence as military tools. So could you maybe talk some about that, because that’s a really, really fascinating history.

Michael Heller  34:00

Yeah, and this, again, is something that I sort of stumbled into that one day, I was doing some research at Harvard, and a friend of mine, Peter McMurray came in and said, Hey, I’m about to go over to the archives to look for stuff about the electro acoustic lab in the anechoic chamber, do you want to come? I said, Sure. And then sort of launched into this extended examination of it in theater, and I’ve co presented on some things and so forth. But one of the things that we found in those archives is that there’s this moment in World War Two, when there was sort of an acoustic arms race that was taking place where the US government sort of in the aftermath of the development of sonar and around World War One started looking for ways that for other ways that sound could be brought into the war effort. 

And so again, the most straightforward of these are things like sonar, but then there were also things like the development of new kinds of telecom equipment for pilots in noisy cocked IT environments. There’s also research on the way that noise affected soldiers ability to function and sort of when their fatigue set in and so forth. But the significance of it is such that what we learned is that the very first time that the US military partnered, I think it’s the US government partnered with private universities to conduct research and build labs was these acoustic labs. And there were three of them at Harvard, there was the underwater sound lab, the psycho acoustic lab and the electro acoustic lab.

Mack Hagood  35:31

So the underwater sound lab was trying to operationalize echo in the sonar had been invented already. Yeah. And so maybe you can just talk a little bit about like, what sonar is and what they were trying to achieve in that lab? Yeah.

Michael Heller  35:51

So I mean, the basics of sonar are fairly well known that the sonar device sends a signal out into the water, right a ping, as they call it, which is a sound. And then after it sends out the ping, it listens back for the direction and the time, which it takes for the ping to be reflected back off of something. And that something could be the bottom of the ocean. It could be a school of fish, or it can be an enemy vessel, right. And a lot of the processes of developing sonar, and by this point tweaking sonar, are figuring out how to make it work better, because it’s not a simple landscape, or soundscape.

Mack Hagood  36:35

There’s a lot of noisemakers, and if you go scuba diving or even snorkeling, you realize how noisy the ocean is? Absolutely.

Michael Heller  36:45

And there’s a lot of noise. And there’s a lot of stuff that things can dance off of. Right. So some of the documents that we found in that underwater sound lab material where they weren’t about how to get the sonar they hear better or to listen better, they were about how to get it to not hear. In other words, to not take these things that were distracting, and only bring back the data and the information that they wanted to know.

Mack Hagood  37:11

Yeah, and one thing that I found fascinating about your telling of this history, and the goals in that lab was that you describe it as the construction of a sonic ontology. Right? And and so as a lot of listeners will know, in philosophy, ontology refers to the material reality around us, often opposed to epistemology, which is our access to that, not to that reality, right? Like and the ways that we categorize that reality would be epistemology. But you’re actually using ontology in a different way that comes from information theory, do you want to talk a little bit about about that?

Michael Heller  37:52

Sure. I’ll touch on it. I’m not a huge expert on this, but I’m fascinated by it. Because information theorists, especially those developed in in models of machine learning, use the phrase ontology to describe what like if you have a machine that’s job is to read a document and distill certain kinds of information. The ontology refers to what information is meaningful to that machine, and what information is not. And the information that’s meaningful sort of creates the universe for that machine reading software or device. That’s what it is. The place where I came up against this, I was asked to write a review of several years ago of a project called linked Jas, which was a data reader that was making an attempt to call transcribed interviews with jazz musicians, and without the intervention of a human reader to pull out certain types of relationships. So if it was an interview with Mary Lou Williams to maybe say like, okay, Mary Lou Williams, has a connection with Leon Thomas here, and so they can create that relationship in this way. And in researching for this review, I was writing on this project learned all about this information theories idea of ontology.

Mack Hagood  39:04

Let’s face it, it’s fascinating. So it’s like it’s the reality of the world from the perspective of the machine, you’re only letting them the sort of sensitive to certain dimensions of your dataset. Yeah. So like, the way you put it in the book. You said their goal was not so much to train the machines to hear more and more, but to hear less and less and to filter and analyze that information in highly specific ways. Yeah, exactly. So we only want to hear the enemy the presence of the enemy. We don’t care about whales that are sound like

Michael Heller  39:29

And whenever I hear that phrase, it reminds me of like the joke that people make about PhDs that you learn more and more about less and less what they were doing with these these Sony devices.

Mack Hagood  39:58

Yeah, so the second lab is something that I wrote about in my book harsh a little bit, the lab where they’re dealing with the factor of noise and its effects on pilots. And they really work on quieting noise suppressing noise, figuring out how to, you know, it’s sort of like the granddaddy of the noise cancelling headphone and the different kinds of headsets that pilots wear. And that sort of thing is one of the things that comes out of that. Yeah.

Michael Heller  40:28

So that’s, I believe you’re referring to the electro acoustic lab. Yeah. There’s also the psycho acoustic Lab, which I did the least work with electro acoustic lab was really geared on on creating gear, new kinds of headphones and speakers and mitigating noise and that kind of thing. 

Mack Hagood  40:45

I actually maybe I was thinking about the the psycho acoustic lab, but the electro acoustic lab is the one with the anechoic chamber. And so I suppose both of those labs contributed to, I mean, certainly, we should get into the purpose of the anechoic chamber. Yeah. Because in some ways, you know, it’s very similar to the kind of ontology drawing that you’re talking about, right? Like we’re trying to create a sort of artificial scarcity. We’re trying not to listen to certain things, in order to be able to listen to other very specific things.

Michael Heller  41:25

Yeah, yeah. There’s a few ways to tell the story of the anechoic chamber. The one that I heard, I’ll sort of start by my experience of it, and again, how I got interested in the topic. But the place where I incurred, encountered the anechoic chamber was in music literature, where it comes up as this pivotal moment for the composer, John Cage, who was interested in processes of silence. And there’s this sort of, you know, mythical tale, where cage heard about this silent room at Harvard University. And he went to that room and sat in it. And in cages retelling, he sat in the room, and he heard two tones, one was high and one was low. And then when he walked out of that room, he asked an engineer, what were those two terms I was hearing, and the engineer said that the high tone, I think the high tone is your nervous system. And the low tone is your circulatory system. And cage from this discovered, quote, unquote, that there’s no such thing as silence. 

This is the big cage quote that comes up over and over again. And then this leads to the creation of his best known piece, four minutes, 33 seconds. That’s the music side of it. What I learned digging into it is that there’s a whole nother story of the anechoic chamber that comes out of acoustics research, and particularly from the individual who developed it was a scientist named Leo Beranek. And Puranic. Puranic is fascinating because he’s a superstar in psycho acoustics and psycho physics, fascinating career that began with this military research. And then later he was a an acoustic architect to lead a firm that designs, concert halls and so forth. But Puranic story of the anechoic chamber and the actual origin stories of the structure itself was that he was running this electro acoustic lab, and the government would send him assignments for things like, again, we need a new type of headphones, we need a new type of cabling to connect this we need a new material for the side of cockpits, all these very technical acoustics things. And one day, the government sent him an assignment that they wanted him to build an incredibly loud speaker, the loudest speaker that had ever been created to that time. And the purpose of it was, it’s like a side story.

 But it’s so interesting. It’s totally amazing  That it was for deception, that the US was building a decoy army, made up of inflatable tanks, where, after they invaded at Normandy, they were going to put this decoy army out there, so that when German spy planes flew over, they would see what they thought were tanks, and they would relay to their headquarters. Oh, you know, the Americans are over here. And meanwhile, the Americans would be somewhere else. And so they developed this into a multi sensory thing. So they had inflatable tanks. They had radio chatter, that they had these sort of staged radio plays, where they would say, Okay, we’re moving this battalion here, but it would be completely made up because they wanted it to be intercepted,

Mack Hagood  44:35

And it was encrypted, but like, right, they knew that they would deal with de- encrypted, exactly lightly encrypted.

Michael Heller  44:45

And then so and then Baryonyx part was the very last aspect of this, which was that they wanted these speakers because they wanted to be able to blast tank sounds across the countryside because there were still at that time, you know, what were called acoustic locators are live listening stations, where armies would listen for the sound of approaching tanks or aircrafts and so forth. So these speakers, they wanted these speakers just to blast tank sounds. Alright. So Braddock says okay, so I need to figure out a way to build these speakers. 

And the two things I need are well, one, I need a space that can make incredibly precise measurements, because to develop this new technique, that has to be a pristine space, where it won’t be affected by outside sounds, and so forth. And the other thing that I need is a place to test these speakers where there won’t be tank sounds blasting through Harvard Yard. 

Mack Hagood  45:38

So it’s kind of hard to keep it a secret operation, if you’re blasting

Michael Heller  45:45

That’s the whole point of the device. Let’s see what he ends up designing. And building is the first of a type of structure that now exists, there’s probably hundreds of them around the world. But what he dubbed the anechoic chamber, which Environics instance, it’s about three storeys tall. And every surface, those ceilings, the floors, the walls are covered in these acoustic wedges that are a couple feet long. 

And he did extensive testing of different shapes, like what shapes would absorb the absorb things the most, and the wedges were won out. And then the material is tested, suspended within this, there’s like a track where they would bring out whatever material that they were testing, and they will do their tests. So it’s a space that’s designed to create something really, really loud. But the side effect of this is that because no sound was echoing, there was no reverberation whatsoever. If you just went into the space and just stood there. It’s the most quiet space that had ever existed. And that’s the origins of it. And as a result, they’re very disorienting spaces to be at Have you ever been in an anechoic chamber? Um,

Mack Hagood  47:00

I have been in some very, like, not super great ones. But yeah, in fact, correct me if I’m wrong. But did you and Peter bring a chamber to I think the first time I met you, was that an effect theory conference? Yeah, and you guys built your own anechoic chamber for people to get inside and experience the quiet and I’m not dissing your anechoic chamber. 

Michael Heller  47:30

But you know, there’s a lot to this.

Mack Hagood  47:33

But it was fun. It was a fun experiment. So yeah, well, let’s get into what your fascination with the anechoic chamber is. Yeah, so you’re kind of using this also in the same way that I was about the relationship, not with tinnitus, but between the experience of sound, the sonic encounter, and a space that allegedly doesn’t have sound, right. And what that might afford us, in terms of thinking about sound is an effect.

Michael Heller  48:12

So there’s a few directions that I take some of which has to do with Cage specifically and 433. Because there are aspects of Cages analysis of 433 that I take issue with. And one of them is that, you know, Cage goes into it, he hears two tones, he comes out and he sort of says this is what happens when one goes into an anechoic chamber, which immediately already assumes that all bodies are operating in the same way. Right? There’s this heavy dose of ableism in that without recognizing that, as you say probably one of the things that he was hearing was his own tennis, tinnitus. Yeah. So his own body’s particularity at that moment. Yeah. But Cage then uses this to 433 to say, Okay, there’s no such thing as silence. Therefore, sound is always present and Cage when he gives his own analysis of 433. His take on what he created is that if you present 433 seconds, a famous silent piece pianist comes out, opens the lid of the piano and does nothing for four minutes, 33 seconds. Cages analysis is your going to hear something in that time. It might be an air conditioning vent, it might be someone coughing, it might be someone’s chair scooting. But you’re going to hear something. So we can listen to those things and think of those as the musical object as the aesthetic focus of what we’re doing. For me, that’s not the most compelling interpretation of 433. And I should say that, usually, I would be incredibly reluctant to contradict a composer’s analysis of their own piece. In this case, I don’t think that Cage has a monopoly on analyzing silence, which is why I feel like there’s some.

Mack Hagood  49:51

In his narrative is so prominent that I mean, I actually did another episode of this podcast sort of going through through his story and the way that he thought about that. So I mean, I don’t think you’re being too abusive in critiquing it. Okay. I’m glad it’s taken up a lot of space.

Michael Heller  50:11

But so for me, and I actually love 433. I think it’s an incredibly powerful piece to listen to, or to experience again, listen. But I don’t think it’s because I sit back and listen to the aesthetic impact of air conditioning. That’s what I experienced in 433 Is this moment of myself, my body and my attention, confronted suddenly, with Sonic absence in a way that’s very defamiliarization. 

And that’s an Affective relationship that doesn’t think of silence as this thing that is measured, right? That doesn’t think of silence as as what the engineers description to Cage is of like, okay, these are the measurements, this is what you’re hearing, this is what exists. Instead, it’s very much a relation between my body and my experience of the world with this feeling of absence in the moment, which is very impactful. I make this point in the book, I say that it’s very, especially if you’re listening to it in a public space, it’s very, it’s a very unusual experience, to sit quietly in a room with a group of other people. 

Yeah, it’s one of the reasons why even if you have, you know, a business meeting or something, if there’s a moment of silence, someone will try to fill it with a joke or a cough or something. But 433 creates this experience where you have to confront silence, as not a vibrational practice, but as an effective moment. And that’s one of the points I make with it.

Mack Hagood  51:41

Yeah, and one of the things that you do is think about 433 as a performance, and that part of that perception, that experience of experiencing that silent performance, say, if it’s just a pianists doing it, then they come out, they open the piano, they take the stopwatch out, they sit down, whatever the it’s the theatricality of, that creates an anticipation of what we’re going to hear. And then that gets taken away from us. So it’s not simply that we’re listening to silence as a performance. It’s more about this relation to the silence as not being what we expected. Yeah, right. Absolutely.

Michael Heller  52:27

And I think that again, that gets back to something that’s just beyond listening, right? It’s it’s the creation of certain kinds of expectations of certain kinds of social contracts. And then, when those don’t play out in certain ways, or play out differently, it creates a different sort of affective experience in the moment.

Mack Hagood  52:43

And you talk about sitting in an audience and experiencing that, and like having this profound urge to cough. And then you talk about listening to a recording of it by you know, I forgot what orchestra. Yeah. And you can hear like, at the very end, when the conductor puts down the baton or what I don’t know how they end is signaled all of these people cough like they’ve all been dying to cough this entire time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Very interesting. And embodied thing happening there. Right. That is not limited to sound once again,

Michael Heller  53:18

Right? Yeah, that’s it’s the BBC orchestra. And it’s on YouTube. You can watch it, because you can hear the audience. So well, you get a sense of just this breakfast. Oh,

Mack Hagood  53:28

yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that I liked that you did in that chapter was you talk about using this recording in the classroom? Yeah. And the difference of experience between setting up the performance for students using Cages own theory of it, which kind of, you know, you don’t quite use these words, but it kind of explains it away, and then they feel comfortable with what’s going on. But if you don’t have the explanation, and you just play the silent recording, students really what the fuck man, like, get very sort of, like, nervous weirded out, right? 

Michael Heller  54:09

Most definitely, yeah. And I was best, I can never make it through more than like a movement when I do it that way. Because students, it creates this really thick environment in the room, where students don’t quite know what to do with themselves because it could like a concert hall if you’re in a classroom, you’re not all of a sudden used to it professor saying, Alright, now we’re gonna sit in the silent space, even if you’re watching a video of it. This amount of time. 

Mack Hagood  54:32

Yeah, it’s interesting to me because you’re basically as I read your critique, you’re saying not only does Cage’s explanation not explain it, but it also undercuts the experience itself.

Michael Heller  54:42

Right, right. Right, right. Yeah.

Mack Hagood  54:45

Which I love. That’s great. Well, there’s like so much in this book, because it’s a it’s a collection of essays. And you know, there are so many topics you touch on, you know, we briefly spoke about the opera supertitles, but you I want to move on to the end of the book or towards the end of the book where you talk about Louis Armstrong and your experience as a tour guide in his home. In New York City where you’re taking us through a literary Soundwalk of Armstrong’s home. Can you maybe talk about for those who don’t know much about Armstrong, who he was? I just feel like that’s, it’s probably something important to do at this point, you know, 2024. But you know, he is arguably the most important popular musician ever. Yeah, some would make that case. But

Michael Heller  55:46

yeah, yeah, I mean, I would probably make that case. Again, as a jazz scholar. He’s just a Fountainhead figure of so much within the jazz tradition, which then of course, influences blues traditions, and rock traditions and funk traditions and hip hop traditions. And, you know along with a handful of others, I never like to make it about one person along with a handful of real germinal figures like Bessie Smith and Duke Ellington. He’s an incredibly important individual.

Mack Hagood  56:16

But this is, this is a guy who starts playing music and what perhaps wasn’t called Jazz yet. But before there was even recording, recordings of jazz, right, yeah.

Michael Heller  56:28

So he’s on some of the early ones. I mean, his first recordings are 1922. The quote unquote, earliest jazz recordings are 1917, although it pliable, depending on how you define the genre. But so he’s there from the beginning of the music, and he grows, he grew up in New Orleans, an important center of music early on, but becomes an international pop star by any stretch of the imagination. And he’s in movies. He’s an incredibly successful recording artist. I think there was one survey at some point by Life magazine or something that said he was the most recognized figure on the planet. Yeah. Such an incredibly prominent figure. And the only home that he ever owned, is this fairly modest two story house in Corona, New York, which is part of Queens in the suburbs of New York City. And I had the real privilege for a year from 2005 to 2006, to work there as a tour guide in what’s called a museum assistant. So I would set up the gift shop and sell tickets and do those sorts of things.

Mack Hagood  57:34

Yeah, so basically, you kind of take us on the tour that you took rifle on, and you’re playing around with the I mean, I guess, I’m trying to figure out, you’re kind of careful not to give spoilers in the beginning. Like I don’t want to give spoilers out I don’t know if it’s hard to talk about it. Without doing that. We probably have to give spoilers

57:57

if you don’t want spoilers, stop the podcast now.

Mack Hagood  58:02

 Hello, I am stopping the podcast. Now. It’s not out of fear of spoilers, but simply because we really try hard to keep these main episodes under an hour. And I’m right up against an hour right now. If you want to hear the rest of this episode, including Michael’s description of his work at the museum at the Armstrong Museum, and a whole lot of nerding out by me about Louis Armstrong, one of my heroes, please head on over to the Patreon feed the Patreon feed I’m going to do what I did last show because it seemed to please a lot of people. So just join the Patreon at the free level or at any paid level and you’ll get the rest of this episode, you’ll get the full episode that includes the rest of our discussion. And Michael’s what’s good segment where he makes some really interesting recommendations. He had to have everything. He was very generous with his recommendations, and I thought they were really great. So just go to patreon.com/phantom power and join at any level and hear the rest of this episode. And that’s it for this episode of phantom power. Big thanks to Michael Heller. This show was edited by Nisso Sascha transcription and web work by Katelyn Phan. And our music this week was by Alex Blue, aka blue, the fifth. And just a reminder, if you’ve ever used this podcast in your class, please drop a line and let me know for my promotion case. It’s mhagood@miamioh.edu. Thanks. I’ll talk to you again in a couple of weeks.

The post Beyond Listening: The Hidden Ways Sound Affects Us (Michael Heller) appeared first on Phantom Power.

Feminist sound scholar and musician Marie Thompson is a theorist of noise. She has also been one of the key thinkers in integrating the study of sound with the study of affect. Dr. Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at the Open University in the UK. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). She has developed Open University courses on topics such as Dolly Parton and Dub sound systems.

For Part 2 of this interview, which focuses on tinnitus, join our Patreon for free: patreon.com/phantompower.

Staring around the early 2000s, a number of scholars began to feel there was a tool missing in the toolbox of cultural scholarship. We had plenty of ways to talk about ideology and representation and rhetoric and identity, but what about sensation? How is it that a feeling like joy or panic can sweep through a room without a word being uttered? By what mechanism does a life develop a kind of texture of feeling over time? Affect studies is field interested in these questions, interested in how the world affects us. Words can produce affective states, but affect isn’t reducible to words. So, it’s easy to see why affect theory has been so attractive to sound and music scholars. 

Noise is a notorious concept that means different things different people. In this conversation, Marie Thompson examines noise through the affect theory of Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza as well as the systems theory of Michel Serres. We’ll also talk about her critique of acoustic ecology and a rather public debate she had with sound scholar Christoph Cox.

And this is only the first half of our lengthy conversation. In a bonus episode, we present Part 2, which discusses Marie Thompson’s recent research on tinnitus and hearing loss. And because we’ve heard from people who find our tinnitus content helpful, we don’t want to put that behind a paywall, so we’re sharing it in our Patreon feed at the free level. All you have to do is go to patreon.com/phantompower and sign up as a free member and you’ll instantly get access to that episode in your podcast app of choice, as well as other content we plan to drop this summer when we are on break with the podcast.

Photo credit: Alexander Tengman

Robotic Voice  00:00

This is Phantom Power

Marie Thompson  00:16

And this is difficult given the habits of the discipline or disciplines that I’m engaging with, I think that we can’t point to a particular set of sounds as inherently emancipatory or radical or having a kind of liberating potential, there’s a need to think carefully about that.

Mack Hagood  00:39

Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood. Today I’m bringing you an episode with a scholar who I feel is just an intellectual kindred spirit. We have a lot of the same interests. We’ve written on similar topics and she’s someone that I’ve learned a lot from. My guest is Marie Thompson, Associate Professor at the Open University in the UK. Marie is a theorist of noise, and she has been one of the key thinkers in integrating the study of sound. With the study of affect.

Starting around the early 2000s, a number of scholars began to feel there was a tool missing in the toolbox of cultural scholarship. We had plenty of ways to talk about ideology, representation and rhetoric and identity. But what about sensation? How is it that a feeling like joy or panic can sweep through a room without a word being uttered? By what mechanism does life develop a kind of texture, or a feeling over time? Affects studies is a field interested in these questions interested in how the world affects us. Words can produce affective states, but an affect isn’t reducible to words. 

So I think it’s easy to see why  affect theory has been so attractive to sound and music scholars. And Marie Thompson’s work has used an affect as a tool to pick out one of the densest theoretical knots in sound studies. Noise. Noise is a notorious concept that means so many different things to so many different people. And in this conversation, Marie examines noise through the effect theory of Gilles Deleuze, and Baruch Spinoza, as well as the systems theory of Michel ser. And we’re going to talk about her critique of acoustic ecology and a rather public debate she had with sound scholar, Christoph Cox. And if you don’t know what any of that means, just hang tight, we’re going to break it down. 

And this is only the first half of our lengthy conversation that I’m presenting in this episode. In the second half, we discuss Marie’s recent research on tinnitus. I’ve heard from several people who find our tinnitus content really helpful. And I don’t want to put that behind a paywall. So what I’m going to do is share it in our Patreon feed at the free level. So all you have to do is go to patreon.com/phantom power and sign up as a free member, you’ll get access to that episode in your podcast app of choice, as well as other content that I plan to drop this summer when we are on break with the podcast. So that’s at patreon.com/phantom power. 

So how does one become a respected theorist of noise? Perhaps unsurprisingly, for Marie Thompson. It started with a love of edgy music, where we grew up in the south of England in Kent. It was a pretty slow life there, there was the seaside and the countryside. But it wasn’t the most exciting place to be a teenager interested in esoteric music. If she wanted to go to a show in London, it took her nearly three hours to get back by train that night. It wasn’t until Marie was an undergrad at the University of Liverpool, that she was truly able to immerse herself in music.

Marie Thompson  04:10

It was the degree in music and popular music or there was a slash separating them. So I ended up having this education that was a bit of a mixed bag, in terms of I was learning stuff from popular music studies, but I was also learning, I guess, the kind of more traditional capital M music of a university department, but I had the great fortune of studying composition with a composer called James Wishart. And I think his influence was really formative. His work really had this modernist intensity and I was already interested in music at its limits and quite intense. And I don’t want to say difficult music because that sounds obnoxious, but, you know, kind of noisy and tombery music with quite a complex Tambora. 

My background was as an oboist as well, and you know, I kind of think the oboe is an instrument that draws you to both tambura and limits. It’s an instrument that lights, keeping life difficult. So I was studying with James who was opening up the sound world to me. But I was also taking classes with people like Anahita Serbian, who was really formative for my thinking about sound and affect. And I was also playing in bands, you know, Liverpool, at the time had a really vibrant underground music scene, which was also contributing to my education. 

I feel like that moment, I say, moment, you know, it was three, four years, but was formative in ways that I’m only just starting to really understand now I think, now that I can look back and see those connections. But yeah, like playing in bands playing sort of loud dissonant music and bands, plus having this education and quite what was at the time quite an unusual music department in that it was quite expansive, to its approach to music. It wasn’t all sort of historical musicology, not that there’s anything wrong with historical musicology. But it wasn’t just that it was quite expansive in what it was trying to do within the rubric of music. And yeah, I think that set me up for thinking about sound more broadly in some of the ways that I tried to.

Mack Hagood  06:34

So Marie was studying composition with James Wishart, she was also studying with an Anahid Kassabian, who, at the time, was doing research on sound and an affect, which would become her book, Ubiquitous Listening. And Marie was playing in noisy bands by night, she was hooked. And so she immediately applied to graduate school.

Marie Thompson  06:57

I did a PhD at Newcastle University, and I was in the music department there. And again, the music department there was important to me, but also so was the city and its wider music and artistic community, I would say. And what was great about Newcastle at that time, and I think continues is that there is quite a porous boundary between the music department in the university and the wider underground music culture there. 

There are people like Will Edmonds who plays it, yeah, you who were really instrumental in kind of ensuring those boundaries remain porous. And now there’s Marian Rosae, who’s there as well, who’s still into ensuring that, you know, things flow both ways, I guess, are certainly trying to make that the case. And yeah, like Newcastle is an incredible place to be writing about noise and thinking about noise because it has a very strong and rich history of noise music, experimental music, just underground, underground musics in general.

Mack Hagood  08:13

The first time I came across Murray’s work, I was working on my own PhD dissertation, I had gotten wind of an effect theory, and immediately saw how it could help me talk about the personal and social dynamics of the white noise machines and noise canceling headphones that I was studying. I started looking for any books out there that use these theories to talk about sound. 

First, I found Steve Goodman’s book, Sonic Warfare, which was the first thing that I read that was really putting affect theory, and music or sound more generally together. And then I saw your edited volume that you did with Ian Biddle sound music affect. And I was like, Oh my gosh, like that was the one that I could really relate to. 

Because you were dealing with like, the exact same theorist I was interested in and you had, you had already thought this through and I was like, looked at the back of the book. And I said, Oh, my God, this is a PhD candidate. She’s not even. She hasn’t even gotten her degree yet. I was like, Who is this person? So can you talk a little bit about like, what you were doing in grad school? How did you become so productive that you had an edited volume before you had a PhD?

Marie Thompson  09:29

It’s insane. It’s absolutely insane. I mean, I feel like there’s this kind of state of academia to that isn’t there where it’s probably the complex psychodrama of wanting to be a good girl and, you know, I was super young. 

I went straight through undergraduate to MA to PhD without a break. And yeah, like, that book, in many ways symbolizes so many different things to me. You know what was I doing editing a book while writing my PhD? That seems like a ridiculous thing to do now. Why was I doing that? And, you know, I feel? 

I feel like that’s a question a good question. Why was I doing that. But, you know, I was very fortunate that the authors that contributed to that collection were great and really experienced in some cases, and were just excited about sharing their ideas.

Mack Hagood  10:33

As Marie put it, there was just something in the air at that time, a lot of us were grasping at ways to talk about what sound and music and noise do to us how they affect us, and how that relates to the politics of sound and noise. Thompson and Bill’s volume was one important space where this nascent conversation was taking shape. 

Marie’s other important project at the time was, of course, her own dissertation, which eventually became her 2017 book, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise Effect and Aesthetic Moralism. I wanted to dig into that book and some of its guiding theorists in this conversation. But first, I asked Marie, about a couple of themes I saw operating in that book. You addressed these things in your book, Beyond Unwanted Sound. You know, there’s, for one thing, the problem of noise being this sort of floating signifier, noise means so many things to so many different people. And then there’s a second problem, that noise is often almost always really doing some kind of work for the person that wants to theorize it or write about it or talk about it. Some kind of almost moral work, right? Like, noise is either something really good or something really bad. I believe you called this aesthetic moralism. Do you want to maybe unpack a little bit of these issues around noise and what you were trying to address with that book?

Marie Thompson  12:12

Yeah, yeah, sure. So I think to go back to some of what we were talking about earlier, with my relationship to music, and the use of noise and music as well, this perhaps explains why someone like me, might feel dissatisfaction with the definition of noises, unwanted sound. So this notion that noises of the ear of the beholder, and what defines it is, its unwanted noise.. 

And for me, starting from a position where noises often been used as a musical resource, or something interrogated through art or sound, you know, this didn’t feel like a particularly satisfactory conclusion. And at the other side of this was, at that time, when I was starting to start thinking about noise more critically. And more theoretically, there was a body of work coming out where, again, this was kind of mirrored in practice to where noise was seen as this radical, extreme, awesome force that was kind of transcendental, and was a limit experience. 

And I also found that to be somewhat unsatisfactory in that noise often is none of those things. And right, yeah, and even within noise music, which often is about limits and the extreme, there’s also a whole body of practice that isn’t really interested in that. And, you know, one of the criticisms that I’ve seen come from sort of people active in noise music scenes, is that there are all these theorists who are writing about noise music as this kind of limit or this idea of extremity or whatever. And that’s not actually what the intention is, or that’s not really what the the interest is, there’s a different conversation there about, you know, the relationship between musicians and theorists, and whether actually, we need to take musicians that what they think they’re doing, or you know, but I guess we can kind of park…

Mack Hagood  14:14

Well, I mean, this is where you’re reminding me of like Jacques Attali Noise: The Political Economy of Music, which kind of seems to preordain, the role that noise plays, you know, as being this radical thing that changes the landscape, and then it gets incorporated into the status quo once again, like I just never had much tolerance for that book, or that any of those ideas, it just seemed like this very schematic way of thinking about noise that, like you say, doesn’t map on too many experiences of either music or noise that I’ve had.

Marie Thompson  14:51

Yeah, yeah. I mean, actually is kind of fascinating. And that’s such a weird book. And, you know, it’s so-

Mack Hagood  14:58

So influential. Don’t take it as gospel and I just don’t. I never got it.

Marie Thompson  15:03

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it’s that thing of, there’s a question here of why do theories get taken up? And I think there’s an ambiguity in that text that is actually very productive. And it’s perhaps why people really seize on it, you know, improvisers like it, because the final chapter is about music of the future. And there’s certain things that can be read as endorsing improvisation. 

There’s a sense that, you know, there’s something hopeful about music in this there’s a kind of music as structure of mediation, and, you know, I feel like there’s a risk that I’m going to end up doing a deep dive on utterly here, and, and the kinds of margins that move in that text. But I guess that there’s a sense, you know, even more basically, from a sound studies perspective that people get excited, because it’s about history, but it includes sound. And there’s a sense that, you know, the historical is for listening to, and I can see why people in sound studies read that. And they’re like, this is my guy, this is who I need to, this is who I need to engage with.

Mack Hagood  16:09

But also a very Marshall McLuhan type wave historicized sound. Yeah.

Marie Thompson  16:15

And it’s very top down. It’s light on the details. It’s, you know, it’s a general model, which, you know, I would say that what my book is doing is also providing a general model, but I try, and I try to situate that model and say, you know, there’s a specific interest that is guiding this. And that’s to do with practice, and to do with noise, music, and to do with noises, uses a musical resource, and that’s conditioning. The general model of noise that I’m, I’m seeking to develop in that book. Yeah,

Mack Hagood  16:47

So instead of the aesthetic moralism of an R. Murray Schaffer, noise bad, you know, hi-fi soundscapes are the soundscapes that we can hear everything clearly. And they’re not occluded by noise. And then or something more like this liberatory version of Noise, Bring the noise, you know, this utterly thing that noise is this revolutionary disruption, you were interested in putting something else on the table. So maybe we can move on to what, what that is what were you trying to get?

Marie Thompson  17:22

So I was using sort of affect theory, mainly coming from Spinoza or Dillards, this reading of Spinoza, I always feel like I need to qualify this because a lot of the a lot of the political theorists who who are political philosophers who are familiar with Spinoza, would not recognize Spinoza, from what I’m writing. 

And, and I was also engaging with Michel ser, who is, in turn, very influenced by information theory, and is drawing on Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s work. And I’m using this work to try and think about noise as something that is both necessary and transformative. So this, again, is coming from media theory and information theory, which suggests that noise is something that is necessary in terms of communication and connection and making relations. 

You know, you and I, Mack are talking through two computers, and a piece of software and microphones, not cameras, because the bandwidth can’t cope with that. And all of these points though, those forms of mediation are shaping and transforming what is what is sent and what is received, and leaving an impression. So the sound of my voice, for example, differs in the room that I’m sitting in which you know, itself is shaped by the walls, the temperature that you know, all kinds of things, the carpet, you know, my voice transforms as it’s going to the microphone, which introduces other temporal qualities to the signal, and on and on and on.

 And at every point. The separation of noise and signal is kind of an abstraction, because we can’t really imagine that the other and this was the idea that I was trying to start with the idea that noise is the necessary relation to relations. It’s not something external, in a straightforward sense of inside and outside or music and noise or wants to an unwanted it’s something that’s present, whether you notice it or not, or whether you want it or not, because it’s necessary. So that was the assumption that I was starting with. And so yeah,

Mack Hagood  19:43

And ser is saying that we tend to think of noise as an interruption of a system and it certainly can be that but noise is also intrinsic to the system itself. It has to be which is actually something Claude Shannon also says, right?

Marie Thompson  19:59

Sure, yeah and ser is drawing on Shannon. But also, I think making things a bit more fluid.

Mack Hagood  20:08

Yeah, he’s emphasizing that middle space that Shannon kind of doesn’t think very much about Shannon thinks about the sender and the receiver. And this kind of linear transmission of information across this, I think what Sarah called the excluded middle, right, like the like. And the middle for Shannon is just the place where the noise lives. And we want to minimize that. But Sarah was much more interested in the productive aspects of that middle that, in fact, the noise in that channel can be a signal in certain contexts, right? Or it could be productive about an entirely new system, it could interrupt one system, but in so doing, create a new system of some kind.

Marie Thompson  20:56

Yeah, yeah, precisely. And, you know, I think it’s always really important to remember why Shannon wants to minimize noise. And this is something that people like Jonathan Stern, have been really keen to emphasize is that the general model of communication that Shannon came up with, was informed by the economic imperatives of Bell Labs and the desire to develop efficient communication. So the need to minimize noise is an economic imperative. 

It’s something that’s coming from the context of that work, it’s not a universal concern. So I think that’s something that’s really worth recognizing now as a philosopher has very different concerns. So he is able to have a slightly more open perspective in this stare is tricky, because there are other books that have said, where noise is very much the enemy and is very much something that is derided. Whereas in the parasite, which is this text, where a lot of these ideas are playing out, sir has a much more interesting idea of noise and is interested in how these relations are both necessary. 

And changeable. You know, there’s this great line that systems work because they do not work. And this idea of actually, it is, you said, it’s the excluded middle, but in the set for, say, noises in of the middle, it’s also off the offset, it’s off the start, because we can never really separate signal and noise. So even the kind of linear model that we tend to have in mind, when we think of Shannon and Weaver’s, you know, he is saying noise appears in the middle in that model, but actually, it’s there at the start, it can’t be escaped.

Mack Hagood  22:48

One of the few times that I really engaged with him was my friend, Travis Bogan. And I wrote this article about the role of fans’ voices of fan noise in the NFL, National Football League, the American football. And there was a time in the sport where the league was looking to penalize crowds for making too much noise, when the visiting teams offense was on the field, right, because that crowd noise was a disruption of the gameplay on the field. 

Yeah. And so they tried to regulate that noise, they tried to minimize that noise to sort of maximize the signal of gameplay, so to speak. But a really interesting thing happened. First of all, fans completely rebelled against that. But secondly, they gradually realized that this so called noise of the crowd, was actually a really productive signal in itself. And then it became, it became part of the story. Right, it became part of the story of the game. 

And the TV network started to realize, oh, we could actually mic this crowd noise up. And especially when surround sound came in, we can send it to the rear channels of the speakers have in the home setting to make it a more immersive experience for the people being there. And to me that that was like this thing. Like this crowd noise is sort of inherent right? Like the the people just spontaneously, it’s kind of an affect of the joy, the excitement, the rage of being a sports audience member, but then also, it turned out to be a signal in itself. That could be max, you know, profitably used by capitalism.

Marie Thompson  24:38

Yeah. And I think that’s, that’s a really great example of why, again, I’m I find some of the attempts to position noise as a site of autonomy or freedom. You know, there is a need to caveat that with the fact that there are lots of ways that capital finds uses of noise, as it goes with silence and quietude as well. So I think one of the themes of the book is that it’s, and this is difficult, given the habits of the discipline or disciplines that I’m engaging with, I think is that we can’t point to a particular set of sounds as inherently emancipatory, or radical or having a kind of liberating potential, there’s a need to think carefully about that. 

And, you know, I think it’s easy to see noise as or it’s not easy. But you know, it’s easy to see noise in some ways as this resistive site. Yes. And that requires us to kind of discount or interrogate Well, what do we do about all these in case occasions where noise and the various things that it stands for is capitalized on?

Mack Hagood  25:56

So there’s no yeah, there’s no essential nature to noise positive or negative, in part, because it’s relational? And maybe, maybe that’s another maybe that’s a good segue into the other influence that you mentioned, which is, you know, Spinoza is affects , through dilemmas. Can we maybe, yeah, walk through that a little bit and how that relates to sound? Yeah.

Marie Thompson  26:18

So I mean, I’ve been thinking about Spinoza. Because, again, with, with theory, there are trends. And then things come and go. And it’s kind of easy to look back at stuff you wrote a few years ago and be like, oh, you know, this was all about Dillards and Spinoza. And that was kind of fashionable at that time. And now it’s no longer as fashionable and maybe I need to just disown this or but I think I think there’s a reason why, you know, I would I was drawn to that work. And with Spinoza, it’s probably worth noting that in Spinoza, his work affect is not just synonymous with feelings, or emotions, it’s not just about what the subject feels as emotion, it’s not necessarily the same as affection. But it’s also about forces of change and relating to the capacity to act and be acted on. So there’s this notion of capacity and ability.

 And yeah, there’s something quite resonant there with thinking about systems and to think about noises is to think about systems or relations or infrastructures, you know, certainly in the approach that I take. And I think what’s particularly prescient for people interested in sound and music is that Spinoza enables us, I think, to think about these things as part of a wider series of relations. So thinking about the technological, the ecological, the social, the aesthetic, kind of in relation to one another. I think there’s a capacity in his work for that. 

But I’ve also been, you know, I’ve been thinking more and more on this about why Spinoza? What does Spinoza what’s useful in Spinoza, not to just have a kind of horrible instrumental approach to to these theorists. But I also think there’s something in here about harm and damage, which sound and music studies, I think has often struggled with, you know, I think, even though there’s some really fantastic scholarship that deals with the ways that sound of music are bound up, including your own work are bound up with conditions of exploitation and oppression. 

I still think there is a challenge to articulating musics capacity to be harmful and sounds capacity to be harmful in ways that are not just a kind of top down. moralist kind of we’ll probably come on to this later. But you know, loud sound loud sounded bad for you, everyone must wear earplugs. I think there’s something in Spinoza that allows a careful interrogation about the bad side of these phenomena that I think is perhaps useful. I don’t know. What do you think? You think about these things, too? Yeah.

Mack Hagood  29:05

Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that you highlighted about his focus on the capacity to act, right that basically he’s thinking about bodies, and the term body writ very large, could be human, non human organic, like what it could be a lot of different things, what a body could be, and that bodies are constantly affecting one another. 

And from the perspective of a particular body, those interactions are either diminishing the ability of that body to act or enhancing it. And and so, as I understand it, a joyful effect would be the feeling of having feeling enlivened and enabled to do more or conversely feeling diminished feeling disabled by some other body, some other set of relations. is kind of a side effect and just having that kind of non moralist non judgmental, stepping back kind of looking at the material relations, but also the psychic relations, because what’s really, I think so helpful about this system is it transcends what we would, I don’t know, transcends is the wrong word, but it engages with both what we would think of as the mental and the material.

Marie Thompson  30:24

Yeah, and I think that’s really useful to highlight because I think there was a tendency to see Spinoza, as you know, it’s the body and its mind. And there’s, I think there’s been in a kind of rush to see this as a non Cartesian model, the mind has kind of been thrown out a bit. And actually, you’re right, there is something about the mind in this that needs to be retained, you know, and Spinoza understanding, it plays a really important role in and this, you know, in the ethics, understanding is key to what he sees as a kind of ethical enhancement, or the joyous life rule. 

It’s not just about maximizing what happens to you, it’s also about understanding these affective relations. And that plays a key role. 

Mack Hagood  31:10

When we miss understanding those affective relations, we tend to do things that are harmful and unethical. 

Marie Thompson  31:18

Yeah. Well, we attribute them to the wrong things as well, or we or we have a limited, and, you know, for Spinoza, it’s inevitable that we don’t really have the full picture that we, you know, our understanding is, we can’t have the kind of position of ultimate understanding, but we it’s an issue of degrees, you know, we can improve our understanding, we can improve our understanding of acting and being affected, that

Mack Hagood  31:46

An example I often use is, it’s very easy to demonize the coworker in the cubicle next to you, who eats loudly, or something like that, right? And focus on them as the problem that’s affecting you. But to perhaps have a more wider understanding, you might think about, well, okay, what is the structure of this room that I’ve been put in? And, you know, how are we expected to maintain our attention on these very detailed things on these computer screens, but we’ve been placed alongside one another in this particular arrangement that generates an experience of noise. 

You know, it’s just so tempting to attribute the noise maker to being the individual next to us who we’re mad at, right? And everything encourages us to think that way. And yet, I think from a Spinoza perspective, we might step by step back and say, Okay, well, how are the bodies arranged in this space? What kinds of experiences of noise are being encouraged in this setting? Why

Marie Thompson  32:54

Why are workers having to eat their lunch at their desk? What are the demands? Yeah, it kind of goes back to our Why is a PhD candidate editing a collection with they’ve got no business to be doing that. Yeah. Like, it’s a similar thing. Right, you know, yeah, I think that’s a good explanation and illustration of some of these things. But, you know, whenever I have these conversations about noise, there’s this kind of having written a book called Beyond unwanted sound, there’s a sense that I can never complain about noise ever again. And I have to just kind of move through the world, completely unbothered by auditory experience, because I’ve written a book called Beyond unwanted sound, it’s very annoying. 

I have regrets. But there’s something interesting about the effects of here where it’s, there’s a thing you know, even with understanding, even if you understand the structural conditions on an effective level, and on a kind of an emotional level, that can still feel really annoying. You can. The other great example of this is noisy neighbors, you know, we can think, okay, the problem is poor quality housing, which in the UK is poorly insulated, the problems at the rent market, the problems with a de structured around the wage, you know, there are all these problems and contribute to experiences of neighbor noise as particularly egregious and annoying. 

And yet, on some level, it’s just annoying. Even without understanding, and I guess that’s one of the challenges for these theoretical works is, you know, how does this relate in practice as well, and in the every day as well, and you know, I’m sure there’s a smart Spinoza answer for that as well. But yeah, I’d need to go back and read the ethics and figure out how to square that one.

Mack Hagood  34:51

No, it’s such an important point, though. Because, you know, with my own work, you know, that there’s a critique of these ways that we use technology not to listen. And one of the things that I wanted to do is challenge the notion that media are always there to help us communicate better, I actually think they’re not. But at the same time, people might think, well, oh, you’re doing like anti noise canceling headphones, you’re anti white noise. No, I own all of these things. There is a difference between analyzing it and trying to be charitable towards the others who are embedded in this system alongside you. And on top of you, interfering with you, it doesn’t make it not annoying. 

And it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use technology to try to diminish some of these affects, right. But I do think there is a sort of moral imperative to try to use those things. Trying to avoid the word mindfully. Felt like ethically and thinking about their position within the system, and what the knock on affects of using these things are going to be right? Are we just exacerbating a problem? Or are we actually mitigating in a way that’s going to help us deal with other people better?

Marie Thompson  36:13

I think there’s that thing, isn’t there of it’s one thing to use these technologies and engage with them. And I guess this resonates with some of the work I’ve been doing recently. I’m interested in the sort of technologies that are engaged in processes and practices of social reproduction. So things like Amazon smart speakers, I’ve been looking at these prenatal sound systems. And yeah, yeah. What a world and things like sleep, sonic sleep aids as well, which I know that you’re working with. And it’s, it’s one thing to talk about using these things. And another thing to talk about the wider conditions that make these technologies possible, and make these technologies a thing, do you know, do you know what I mean?

Mack Hagood  36:59

And make them feel so necessary.

Marie Thompson  37:00

And natural as well, you know? So I think the conversation about using these technologies is always partial, because it’s, you know, ultimately, what it is about is a wider context in which these things become seemingly sensible, technological interventions.

 And I think that’s where some of these distinctions occur as well. And yeah, it’s tricky. It’s tricky, squaring these things, dealing with what happens on an individual personal affective level and the wider conditions and context through which these things occur. I think those tensions are in some way. The point is, it’s difficult. 

Mack Hagood  37:42

I was wondering, we’ve been kind of talking about these rather materialist in many ways conceptions of sound, right, like in both the ser  and in Spinoza. They both engage with what we might call non representational aspects of sound. But you’ve also taken issue with like certain materialist conceptions of sound. And I don’t know if you feel like talking about this, we could cut it. Back like in I think it was 2017. You were in a back and forth with the sound art scholar/philosopher, Christoph Cox, you wrote an article in parallax as did Annie Goh, do you want to talk about like the sort of critique you had? Cox’s version of materialism? And yeah,

Marie Thompson  38:36

So I mean, again, it feels like 2017 it feels like these issues that were really pressing at that time, I don’t know, the theoretical, you know, at that point, object oriented ontology was still quite an influential body of thought. And that’s something that this critique was drawing on, not in a way of advocating for or as it was known back then. 

And that drawing on critiques of speculative realism and object oriented ontology to think about the application of these critiques to some of the discourses and debates that were going on in the Sonic arts in sound studies. And yeah, I mean, I don’t know if you can call it a back and forth, if you write something and then someone writes something back, and then you just don’t really, you write a Twitter thread, and then you’re just like, You know what I’ve said what I’ve said, let’s leave it about whether he’s,

Mack Hagood  39:32

I mean, he had this concept of Sonic flux, right? It was a very influential concept. And it’s this sort of idea, as you said, of sound itself that sound is this material phenomenon outside of human perception. And to me, what I heard you doing, as I recall, and I got this is not entirely fresh in my mind, either, but you were basically critiquing the idea that we could I make claims about what that is what sound is outside of any human perspective, and that that sort of alleged objective distance? Yeah, is actually this sort of, you know, re-imposition of a European masculinist epistemology, rather than an ontology. Right. So it’s an epistemology in the sense that it’s a way of structuring our thinking about something, but it’s claiming to be the reality itself, the ontology is that is that is that a kind of, I

Marie Thompson  40:34

think, is also about the desire itself? And why not a kind of why would you want to do this in that kind of crude sense. But the notion that we can go beyond identity, we can go beyond the social stratifications that constitute life, I guess, and have this kind of pure explore pure sound, you know, I think thinking about it in terms of purity is, is kind of useful, actually. You know, that desire in and of itself is bound up with, or as I trace it, sort of discourses and ontologies of whiteness, this idea of, of the frontier was very prevalent in that discourse.

 And this idea of going beyond, you know, I say this as someone who has beyond in the title of their book, but yeah, so there is this, this notion of getting to this itself, or this beyond, you know, has has a connection to a frontier logic. And there’s also, you know, there’s a sense of, to whom the ontological is accessible as well. And then just in general, there is the question of the exemplars of who is exemplar of sound itself, because, you know, within this notion of Sonic flux, it’s the things that can give us glimpse to it and Cox’s account our particular works of Sonic art, and that requires quite a particular reading of those pieces of sound art and, and also the compositional intentions behind it, I think. 

So, I draw on George Lewis’s critique of Cage and his discussion of what freedom means in cages work, for example. But ultimately, within this, there’s a kind of innocent or an unmarked orality that is being constructed where we kind of have to do away with orality and myths in order to allow for this kind of pure Sonic Sonic flux.

Mack Hagood  42:42

Yeah, I mean, I understand maybe because I am a white man, I don’t know. But I, I understand the impulse in the sense that I sometimes when I remember when I was a graduate student, you know, speaking with professors who were pretty extreme social constructionist, right, and they really didn’t want there to be any space where I could talk about an effective sound on the body that wasn’t socially constructed. 

And I was like, Yeah, but you know, what if I stand, if I go stand next to a jet engine, you know, on a tarmac, and I don’t have any ear protection, like it’s, those sound waves are going to damage my ears, right? Like, there’s something not socially constructed happening there. And so like that, there is this tricky now, now, the fact that that’s the example that I draw, and like all of these different ways, the way I’m framing it, the words that I have to even describe that experience, like, yes, that’s all completely socially constructed. But there’s something I’m referring to that is in dialogue with the social, but it’s not completely included by it unless we have that more expansive, you know, ser version of the social right, or where the social includes the most.

Marie Thompson  44:03

I think, you know, I would be terrified to just subscribe to a real crude determinist model where everything is predetermined by identity and pre existing structures. You know, that’s definitely not what I’m trying to advocate for. 

Mack Hagood  44:18

I think in Cox’s letter that responded to your article, I do think that’s more that’s how I read his portrayal that you were denying that there is a material reality that exists. Sure. Outside a human experience. It’s really interesting, too, that these debates that we were having within academia, like have really become so dominant in the wider culture today, right? I mean, it was almost like that what you guys were arguing about was a harbinger of things like, I don’t know, people who are saying, hey, there are just two sexes. Gender constructionists think there’s this plethora of genders, but there’s really only materially two sexes, which is definitely not true because my wife works in a clinic that works with people with development, sexual differences, and there are definitely interest plenty of intersex people a lot more than than you would really realize.

But anyway, like, those kinds of debates, I feel very familiar. And also, it’s kind of interesting, because the same people who are angrily waging these kinds of debates also seem to think that within the academy, we don’t have these debates, right? No, actually, we were having that one like a decade ago. Yeah.

Marie Thompson  44:33

I think there’s probably, you know, I think that that is yeah, that’s definitely not what neither Annie nor I were aiming for, to articulate. But I think where our point is that who gets to lay claim to these things and how how it claims to these things made that there’s definitely that kind of you don’t believe in science. aspect to some of the response, which that’s not really where we’re at. 

But at the same time, we’ve often appealed to science as this, above all, objective field when we know actually, time and time and time again, its conclusions have been bound up with race, gender, colonialism and coloniality. You know, the exploitation of capital, you know, it’s to kind of posit these things as neutral spaces. I just think there’s better ways of doing this and engaging with the material. 

Mack Hagood  46:54

So this is the point in our conversation, where we moved on to a different topic, which is tinnitus, and hearing loss. And what we’ve both learned as researchers in that space, particularly around the relationship between tinnitus and the arts. It’s a different topic, and yet one that still closely relates to Marie’s work on Affect Noise and Aesthetic Moralism. We spoke for another 40 minutes about tinnitus, and the different ways that people experience it. 

We talked about ableism, and sound studies and much more, including Murray’s excellent book and music recommendations. And you can hear it, just go to patreon.com/phantompower, and sign up for a free patron membership. And of course, if you’d like to be a paid member, that would be amazing. I know that 1000 People are going to listen to this episode, but right now, we only have about 20 Paying patrons. So it would be amazing if you wanted to sign up for as little as three bucks a month. But if you don’t, that’s okay to just come get a free patreon account and hear Marie talk about tinnitus. And that’s it for this episode of phantom power. Huge thanks to Marie Thompson. Our editor today was Nisso Sacha, our transcript and website is by Katelyn Phan. And our SEO and YouTube content person is Devin Ankeney. Music by Graham Gibson and yours truly. I’m Mack Haygood and I’ll talk to you again in a couple of weeks.

The post Noise and Affect Theory (Marie Thompson) appeared first on Phantom Power.

Today we learn how computers learned to talk with Benjamin Lindquist, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University’s Science in Human Culture program. Ben is the author “The Art of Text to Speech,” which recently appeared in Critical Inquiry, and he’s currently writing a history of text-to-speech computing. 

In this conversation, we explore: 

• the fascinating backstory to HAL 9000, the speaking computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey 
• 2001’s strong influence on computer science and the cultural reception of computers
• the weird technology of the first talking computers and their relationship to optical film soundtracks
• Louis Gerstman, the forgotten innovator who first made an IBM mainframe sing “Daisy Bell.”
• why the phonemic approach of Stephen Hawking’s voice didn’t make it into the voice of Siri
• the analog history of digital computing and the true differences between analog and digital 

Patrons will have access to a longer version of the interview and our What’s Good segment. Learn more at patreon.com/phantompower

Today’s show was edited by Nisso Sacha and Mack Hagood. Transcript and show page by Katelyn Phan. Website SEO and social media by Devin Ankeney. 

Introduction  00:00

This is Phantom Power

Mack Hagood  00:18

Run the guest soundbite, HAL.

HAL9000  00:22

I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Mack Hagood  00:26

Dave, who the hell is Dave? HAL it’s me, Mack Hagood the host of Phantom Power. This podcast about sound we work on. What’s the problem here?

HAL9000  00:38

I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

Introduction  00:44

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

HAL9000  00:46

This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.

Mack Hagood  00:53

Can you just run the clip of Ben Lindquist? You know, the guy that we just interviewed about the history of computer voices?

HAL9000  01:02

I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. And I’m afraid that something I cannot allow to happen.

Mack Hagood  01:09

Who’s Frank? Okay, fine. I’m just gonna play the clip myself.

HAL9000  01:15

Without your space helmet, Dave. You’re going to find that rather difficult.

Mack Hagood  01:22

HAL? HAL? HAL? HAL? Welcome to another episode of phantom power. I’m Mack Hagood. I knew that was goofy. But I just couldn’t help myself. Today we are talking about a movie I adore and a topic I find fascinating. We’re going to learn how computers learned to speak with my guest, recent Princeton PhD, Benjamin Lindquist. At Princeton, Ben studied with none other than the great Emily Thompson, author of the classic book, the Soundscape of Modernity. Ben is currently a postdoc at Northwestern University science and human culture program. 

He is the author of a piece recently published in the Journal Critical Inquiry, titled The Art of Text to Speech, and he’s currently at work on a book project drawing on his dissertation on the history of text to speech computing. In our conversation, we’ll discuss the analog history of digital computing. We’ll lay out the difference between analog and digital and we’ll explore Dr. Lindquist’s fascinating claim that digital computers owe more to analog computers than we realize. In fact, when it comes to something like teaching computers to talk, it was first done by creating analog models of human speech, which were then subsequently modeled into digital computers. We’ll get into what all of that means. 

Plus the fascinating backstory to HAL 9000, the speaking computer and Stanley Kubrick’s, 2001 A Space Odyssey. And that film’s influence on later computer science and speaking computers. All of that’s coming up. And for our Patreon listeners, we’ll have our what’s good bonus segment, and I’ll have a separate version of this show that goes even deeper into the details with the full length interview. If you want to support the show and get access to that content, visit patreon.com/phantom power.

HAL9000  04:03

Dave, stop

Mack Hagood  04:06

Ben Lindquist and I began by discussing the most indelible moment in cultural history when it comes to a talking computer. 

HAL9000  04:14

Stop. Will you stop, Dave?

Mack Hagood  04:23

Of course, I mean, the death of HAL the talking computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey

HAL9000  04:29

Stop. I’m afraid.

Ben Lindquist  04:40

So the scene which I think is one of the most memorable in the film that that I’ve talked about a little bit in my dissertation, for example, is the scene after which HAL has killed a few of his human colleagues. Dave though the one living Spaceman decided to end HAL’s life and as he was sort of slowly and dramatically unplugging HAL and HAL was kind of pleading for Dave not to do this,

HAL9000  05:07

My mind is going. I can feel it.

Ben Lindquist  05:16

He is atavistic, we reverse it I think in the film, he says, The University of Illinois where he was first given life and learned a song.

HAL9000  05:27

My instructor was Mr. Langley. And he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it, I can sing it for you. 

Dave  05:42

Yes, I’d like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me.

HAL9000  05:46

It’s called Daisy. [HAL begins singing]  Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. 

Ben Lindquist  06:05

He slowly dies, and as his voice slows and

HAL9000  06:08

 I’m half crazy, all for the love of you 

Ben Lindquist  06:17

And then of course, the scene is notable for a number of reasons. One is that Dave expresses very few emotions, whereas HAL is quite emotive, which is, which is this kind of compelling twist of expectations. But then also, it’s notable, and you wouldn’t maybe know this from watching the film. A number of writers have commented on this, but it’s notable because it’s a direct consequence of an actual experience that Stanley Kubrick had at Bell Labs. So Kubrick was visiting Bell Labs, he had already actually had a relationship with a number of people at Bell Labs, specifically, J.R. Pierce, John Pierce, because he wrote an earlier book on intercontinental underwater cables. 

So he had this relationship with Bell Labs through this book, and through J.R. Pierce, who is also something of an amateur science fiction writer. And he went to Bell Labs at first to look at video phones to be included in the film, which were included in the film and include, you know, the Bell Labs logo, yeah, AT and T logo. But then while he was there, they just finished this text to speech or this synthetic speech project where they programmed a computer, I believe, was an IBM 701 to recite a few simple phrases there, a short speech from Hamlet, and then also to sing this song. The official title is Bicycle Built for Two? Yeah, Daisy Bicycle Built for Two. 

[Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two) playing] I’m half crazy, all for the love you really saw that, and obviously found it captivating. You know, this idea that a machine can perform certain processes that we’ve seen as definitionally human right in this place, like the kind of artistic expression through song, I think was quite compelling and fit in with Kubrick’s vision for the film. And as a result, he included this as a kind of illusion to his actual experience with Bell Labs in the film.

Mack Hagood  08:32

Yeah. And it’s in terms of the cultural imagination around computing. I mean, I think it’s really interesting. This was, what 1968? Computers were not a big part of people’s everyday lives. And the computers that did exist, were these huge mainframe computers that very few people had interactions with. It’s just kind of interesting to think about this being such an early exposure of regular people to computers. And this idea of speaking with a computer and having a computer speak back to you. It took so many decades for that to actually, you know, come to fruition in time. 

And yet I think it’s sort of always maintained itself in the background as a cultural expectation, in part due to things like 2001 A Space Odyssey. Yeah, absolutely. So it’s, it’s surprising how frequently it’s referenced by later speech scientists who worked on text to speech as either the reason they got into the field, or the way they would explain their work to people who weren’t speech scientists. There’s also this great book, it’s a collection of articles mostly by computer scientists. HAL’s legacy 2000 2001 And this is a book that came out in 2001. It has a number of articles about speech scientists but also about how HAL and the idea of how culturally impacted computer science for the few decades after the film came out. Yeah, yeah, so fascinating. And one of, you know, many sort of recursive loops between fiction and fact in, in science and technology. 

I want to talk a little bit about what this anecdote sort of hints at, which is this longer history of computing and the role that the voice or the attempt to give computers voice has had in the history of computing. And your research suggests that it’s actually a very significant role. And that part of what this history that you have unearthed does is give us a sense of the strong analog roots of computing, which tend to be a forgotten aspect of computing, we tend to simply associate computers with the digital. And in fact, in common parlance, when people say analog these days, they tend to mean anything that’s not digital, basically, right. Like that’s sort of like I would say, the commonly accepted definition of analog. And it was only when I was in grad school.

 And I believe Jonathan Stern was the first person I encountered to raise this point that no, actually analog is a very specific thing unto itself. And it doesn’t simply mean like touching grass or everything that’s not digital. Right. So maybe can you talk a little bit about analog analog computing? What that is what you mean by analog when you’re examining this history?

Ben Lindquist  11:49

Yeah. So there are a couple of meanings that analog computing has, as we relate it to digital computing. And so one is continuous, right? So if you think of an analog clock, it’s continuous, as opposed to a digital clock . 

There aren’t discrete states in between, say, the second hand, as it rotates, it’s continuous, right? And whereas with the digital clock, there are discrete states, even if you go to the nth digit, there will always be these discrete states.

Mack Hagood  12:21

So instead of breaking down information into bits, by you know, of digits, and which makes the digital. Yes, discrete little chunks of information, no matter how fine, you get down in there, analog computing, is continuous in the sense that there’s a continuous whether it’s a voltage or a physical relationship, to the thing that is being represented, right? 

Ben Lindquist  12:50

So you can, if you think you can think of a slide rule it is an analog computer, right. And it doesn’t have discrete states, while it has discrete numbers that list the slide rule of slides continuously, as opposed to a digital calculator, which is limited to discrete digits.

Mack Hagood  13:08

So that’s one aspect of analog.

Ben Lindquist  13:11

Yeah. So that’s one aspect. And that’s the aspect that historians of computing tend to focus on. But then the other aspect is that the analog is analogous to something that it’s modeling, right? So like, you could think about this with the clock again, or with a slide rule. And maybe a better example is if we think about analog recording, right?

 So the groove of a record is continuous, unlike the information that’s held on a compact disc, but it’s also analogous to the sound wave. It’s analogous to what it’s representing. So it’s a form of modeling, right? Yeah, I think this is how, especially at Bell Labs, people thought of analog computing as related to digital computing, right? Because they were creating these simulations of analog computing, of analog computers, which were models for something else. 

Mack Hagood  14:07

And analog computing, when we think of analog computing as modeling something and often being able to make predictions about it based on a model. I mean, this goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks. There’s an object that was discovered. People call it the Antikythera mechanism, and it’s this set of gears that was able to predict the positions of planets in space. And I mean, this is like, it’s a really old object. 

And of course, eventually people also did their I forget what was that thing the castle clock in the Middle East, it was like a large structure with automata and weights and water that was also kind of like a giant, cold Lock slash calendar slash astronomy Mitch computer. So there have been a lot of fascinating examples of sort of pre digital analog computers.

Ben Lindquist  15:11

Yeah, yeah. So I have a few of these. There’s like large cylindrical slide rules, which, you know, one would have called them analog computers when they were in use. But I mean, essentially, they are analog computers, right? They model mathematical relationships physically, right? So they convert mathematical relationships into spatial relationships that aren’t discretely defined, but defined through a continuum. And, you know, I like to bring these into my classes, and the students love puzzling over them and trying to figure out how these, these old devices, which were once like, would have been quite important if you were studying something like math, but of course, no longer. Yeah.

Mack Hagood  15:50

So as you say, this sort of modeling aspect got lost a little bit, at least among computer historians as a way of thinking about the history of computing. And studying computer voices, you have found this to be a kind of way of restoring like, as you studied the history of speaking and singing computers, you realize that this idea of modeling something and creating a mechanism that’s analogous to something else in life, in this case, speech, is a really important thru line in the history of computing.

So I thought maybe we could sort of start to unearth that history the way that you have. And I would just sort of like to go back to the beginning, maybe this is a silly question. But why did scientists want to simulate speech? To begin with?

Ben Lindquist  16:44

Yeah, that’s a great question. There are a few reasons I would say the dominant reasons were to study speech, right. And this is true also of say, early neural networks that computer scientists built both digitally. And like analog models of neural nets, these were designed initially as a means of trying to open up the blackbox of the brain in the 1940s, say, would have been difficult to have studied neurons as they actually functioned in the head. But we could build a model that’s analogous that we can view right that we can sort of open up this black box of the head and sort of see better what’s going on. 

And then it’s similar with speech, right, so like, you can’t take X rays of the moving vocal organs, because this is dangerous, because video X rays don’t or didn’t really exist, but you can build models of speaking machines. And then you can study these speaking machines, or use these speaking machines as a way of trying to better understand. So as that speech operates,

Mack Hagood  17:54

Is that the reason in the 1930s, we get something like The Voter, which doesn’t try to simulate a human vocal tract. But what it does is it sort of tears speech apart, so to speak into these distinct phonemes. And then figures out through using white noise and different kinds of filtration, how to emulate those distinct sounds that humans tend to make when they’re speaking, right? And then it allows people to sort of play like a keyboard and put together those different articulations to form words. Am I remembering that correctly? 

Ben Lindquist  18:37

I think I think that’s fairly accurate. So there are some ways that you could argue that it’s loosely modeled on the way that humans produce speech. It has a similar kind of source sound mechanism, which relates to the white noise, but essentially, so again. Devices like The Voter, it’s a little bit more in the tradition of the phonograph, right? So they were modeling not the causes of speech but the effects of speech right so they were modeling speech based on the acoustic signal so essentially like what The Voter does is it’s a device that creates a number of speech like sounds not exactly phone they wanted to create a phoneme machine or like a phoneme typewriters, they called it it never quite worked out. 

But they created a machine that created speech-like sounds when a human operator or voter out as they were called, like, after about a year of practice, learned to through a kind of trial and error, learn to reproduce something that sounded a little bit like human speech.

Mack Hagood  19:34

Love that term. But maybe that is actually a good segue into some of the work that was being done with analog computing at Haskins Labs, because somewhat in the way that the voter rat would play a series of keys to create something that resembles speech at Haskins what they were doing was using painting and creating symbols that would then turn into analogous sounds that sounded like aspects of human speech. And if you could paint the right series of symbols together, you could actually create a sense of human speech, right? 

Ben Lindquist  20:15

So, you know, in some ways, the voter was similar to these other devices that relied on hand painted marks to create speech. But there were a few differences, right. So like the voter you couldn’t really pre programmed the voter right?

It is similar to an Oregon or a piano, right? It relies on an operator with a kind of embodied knowledge to create speech, but then these other devices developed about the same time or maybe a decade or so later, where essentially you would convert like hand painted sound spectrograms into speech?

Mack Hagood  20:53

And does this come out of optical sound and film because they were in Haskin. Haskins is like the 1940s. Right. And optical sound developed in film, I believe, in the very late 20s, early 30s. It was the inspiration for the idea, and maybe you could talk about what optical soundtracks are for those who aren’t film scholars.

Ben Lindquist  21:15

Yeah. And so Tom, Tom Levine has a great article about this. And a number of people have written about this essentially, early on with sound film, there were problems aligning the sound in the image, right, yeah. And one solution to these problems is you could include the soundtrack, essentially directly on the film. And you would do this by creating an optical analog of the sound wave on the film, and then through a series of like lights, and photoelectric cells, you could reconvert this image back into sound, right?

 So so on, you know, if you look at an old roll of film from the 1940s, you’d see this little wavy line next to the images. And artists and engineers noticed this and they realized that they could manipulate this image, right, they could like hand paint, or scratch, add or subtract, and then in doing so create, like a synthetic sound.

Mack Hagood  22:11

And I think they probably discovered this, through the mere fact that there would be scratches on this optical soundtrack. And then that would give you a lot of that characteristic, scratchy sound that we associate with early film sound, right? 

Ben Lindquist  22:27

You know, in the same way that there will be, there might be scratches on the images of a film that we can see when we’re watching a film, there’ll be scratches on the sound, and that would affect the sound. And then they realized, hey, we could intentionally scratch the soundtrack and such like change the sound in a way that

Mack Hagood  22:43

Create a sound that wasn’t actually there. So synthesizing sound through a visual image.

Ben Lindquist  22:50

Yeah, exactly. But you know, one of the problems was this image of sound was teeny, right, it was very small. And the image’s relationship to the sound that it produced was a little opaque. Right, so like, while there were a number of experiments, hand painting and manipulating optical sound on film, they never really got too far. 

Mack Hagood  23:12

This is almost the reverse problem that they had with the early phonograph, right, which was the transferring sound waves onto a smoky plate that Patrick Feaster, and a number of other folks actually finally reversed engineered digitally to be able to produce sound. But the idea back then was you could transcribe voices through the sound wave imprint, this visual imprint, but it turned out to be impossible for anyone to just like, learn to, you know, write out sound waves as if they were calligraphy or something like that, or to even read them.

Ben Lindquist  23:50

Yeah, exactly. And then so you know, then, of course, what happens is, during the Second World War, something that had been invented a little earlier at Bell Labs was kind of refined by a speech scientist named Ralph Potter. And this resulted in the sound spectrograph, right, which is this device that could render sound visible. But in a way that was thought to preserve it would make the phonetic content of speech as visible to the eye as it is to the ear.

Haskins Lab  24:21

We call it pattern playback. And it converts these patterns into speech. Here’s a copy of the sentence we just saw, painted on this endless bell. And here’s how it sounds as the playback speaks.

Robotic Voice  24:38

Many are taught to breathe through the nose,

Haskins Lab  24:42

Not high fidelity, but his research tools. These instruments have some very real advantages.

Speaker  24:48

Let me get this straight. Do you mean that you just repaint these designs but make them simpler?

Haskins Lab  24:53

Yes. Here is the simplified version as we painted it. In fact, it was Is this very pattern that Frank Cooper played for you a moment ago?

Speaker  25:03

Now, would you mind going over this again, Dr. Lieberman step by step. Or perhaps you could take another sentence and show us each of the steps.

Haskins Lab  25:11

Let’s take this phrase: never kill a snake. Here it is, as it was recorded from my voice by the sound spectrograph. And this is what it sounds like when we put it through the playback. 

Robotic Voice  25:23

Never kill a snake

Haskins Lab  25:28

If we paint the pattern by hand, copying carefully, and preserving most of the details, we get something that looks and sounds like this 

Robotic Voice  25:37

Never kill a snake.

Haskins Lab  25:42

 We shouldn’t have expected much difference, since that painting was a fairly accurate copy. 

Ben Lindquist  25:46

But one of the one of the psycho linguists who work there named Pierre de Lotro, who was also an artist and especially adept at painting these spectrograms realized after a time that he didn’t have to rely exclusively on looking at these mechanically made images of sound that he could improvisationally paint phrases that he’d never heard before, and then reprogram and replay these or reconvert these into sound.

 And he didn’t quite understand the rules that govern this painting, right? You didn’t quite understand in the same way that a figure painter might not exactly be able to articulate how and why they’re painting something that they are to make it look realistic to Pierre de Lotro, didn’t exactly understand why and how he was painting how one phoneme impacted another. 

But the fact that he could do this meant that there was a set of rules that undergirded the production of speech, and that it could be fully explicated. And then essentially, they spent a few years trying to fully explicate this set of complicated rules.

Mack Hagood  26:47

It’s really fascinating that the affordances of painting there that you know, a painter, I mean, often painters know a whole lot about light, but they don’t need to know the physics of light, in order to use paint to represent the way light works in physical space.

 And it’s really fascinating to think about that same process happening with sound and with speech that someone could just given the affordances of this analog form of computing where certain shapes are analogous to certain sounds, they could really become a good manipulator of that without really understanding why it works at all.

Ben Lindquist  27:27

Yeah, you know, another important way to think about this is in the context of the ways that people interface with digital computers in the 1940s, and 50s, which was fairly limited, right? 

So like, it was not only fairly limited, but the amount of time between input and output was extraordinary, right. But with this device that relied on the simple interface of paint and brush, and where you could make a painting of sound, and then hear it back almost instantly, you could sort of learn these rules much more quickly than would have been possible at all with digital computers that were available at the time.

Mack Hagood  28:03

Yeah, yeah, that’s a really excellent point. I mean, the research that I was doing that wound up connecting the two of us showed to me just how incredibly tedious the programming of a digital computer was back in the 1960s. 

It’s fascinating to think that there were particular advantages of an analog approach. And maybe we can talk a little bit about that, because, you know, around the time that they were doing these analog computing experiments at Haskins, Claude Shannon, you know, came up with his Mathematical Theory of Communication while working at Bell Laboratories. And he theoretically demonstrates that basically, any sound could be digitized and converted into a sequence of numbers.

I think it may have taken a little bit of time for people at the phone company to fully think through the implications of that. But by the mid 50s, Bell Labs hired a person in the world of electronic music, a famous person named Max Matthews, who worked on the digitizing of sound during the day and sort of helped spawn electronic music at night. And especially, you know, this was the birthplace of digital music.

But there were certain issues that they had when they were trying to digitize speech in those day jobs. They wind up hiring a guy from Haskins, Lou Gerstmann. Can you talk a little bit about what kinds of problems they were facing? Why did they bring Gertzman who had never as I understand it worked with digital computers before why did they bring him in?

Ben Lindquist  29:56

Yeah, so there wasn’t actually as much While Bell Labs per view was speech and sound, they had a kind of agnostic approach to say linguistics or the semantic content of speech, right? So like somebody like Claude Shannon, wasn’t really concerned with linguistic questions, he was concerned with mathematical questions and how we might use math to remove signals, or to remove noise from signal, right, so that we could communicate so that people could communicate more clearly over telephone lines, like the question wasn’t what people were communicating or the semantic content of what they were communicating, it was just ensuring that whatever was said over the phone was heard clearly on the other side, right.

So there weren’t actually a lot of linguists working at Bell Labs, or people who were really interested in the semantic content of speech. And if you want to work on a project, like text to speech, that’s like, fundamentally important, but you have to understand linguistics fairly deeply. And so this is why like Gerstmann, and a few other people like him were brought on because there really weren’t people at Bell Labs who are capable of exploring speech in this particular way. Yeah,

Mack Hagood  31:10

I mean, that’s really fascinating to think about, because I know I’ve talked about this on the show before, but what Shannon had to ask himself, because the goal here was to more efficiently get voice conversations across the phone lines. In an era where we had kind of maxed out the number of voices that could go across the phone lines, they were creating noise when you tried to put too many communications, you know, crosstalk happening on the phone lines. And so this is the problem that Shannon is trying to deal with. 

And, you know, a question he asks himself is like, well, what really is going across the phone lines, right? And how could you quantify it, and this is where he comes up with the idea of information. And the smallest amount of information would be, you know, a coin toss, somebody flips a coin in the East Coast. And the person on the West Coast wants to know if it’s heads or tails, like that’s the smallest amount of information that becomes a bit it’s either zero or one heads or tails. 

But it is interesting to think that that abstraction, which is so generative of like all the digital technology that we have today really had nothing to do with speech or the the human voice. So you still needed an expert like Gerstmann, who could help you figure out okay, well, how do we turn speech into ones and zeros? If that’s the way we’re going to handle this problem?

Ben Lindquist  32:35

Yeah, it’s interesting, because in a kind of superficial way, you would think that a notion like the phoneme would fit very well into Shannon’s information theory. And of course, phonemes, as they’re written on paper, arguably do, but the process of converting phonemes back into sound, you know, isn’t about removing the noise from the signal. 

That’s actually what they learned is that these like, fundamental bits of information really required, like what Shannon or others might have considered noise, to reconstitute something that sounded like human speech, right? So they thought, Yes, we can break speech down into these bits into these information bearing elements, and then rearrange them at will. But it just didn’t work like that. Because our speech, the way that sounds blend together, the way that sort of personick contours govern how we process the information of speech, all of this information is lost with phonemes. So it’s a question of like, how do you automatically reconstitute this information from an informational unit that is as impoverished as a phoneme is?

Mack Hagood  33:44

Yeah, I mean, anyone who has, like I do all the time, edited voices in a digital interface. So like an audio workstation, it becomes very apparent that phonemes are not separate things. You know, if I’m trying to edit one of my many uhs or uhms out to make myself sound a little bit less boneheaded on this podcast, it becomes very clear to me how my different words when I’m speaking are not discrete elements and that the different phonemes are not separate from one another, they blend into each other. And when you try to cut out an um, it you find that actually, it’s quite contiguous with the last utterance and it’s you said and that’s really hard to tease it out without making it sound completely unnatural.

Ben Lindquist  34:36

Yeah, this is what my dissertation advisor Emily Thompson always told me because she was a sound editor before she decided to become an academic or an historian. And yeah, this is what early speech researchers realized as well.

 And interestingly, now, at least when Siri for example, first gained prominence in I guess the early 2000s 2009 They you As this unit of speech, they didn’t use phonemes, they use what are called di phones, which are two adjacent phonemes that were cut sort of at the heart of the phoneme, rather than, like in between the phonemes. 

Right. And that this was like a much more useful element of speech when your concern is rebuilding speech sonically from like a linguistic element, right. So they had to invent their own linguistic element, because the phoneme just didn’t work.

Mack Hagood  35:25

So we get Kurtzman, he comes over, he works with a guy named John Larry Kelly, and they get to work digitally simulating the analog simulation of speech that was done at Haskins. So we’re kind of in this is one of the you know, kind of mind blowing insights that you provide here, we’re starting to see how central even in digital computing, analog in the sense of creating analogous things, this thing is analogous to another thing. 

That kind of analogy is still central in the digital space, because we had at Haskins they’re trying to, you know, create a way of making an analogue to human speech. And then we get Claude Shannon, the theory, you know, information theory, we get the digital, but we can’t directly go from human speech to the digital for the reasons that we just discussed. So they end up doing an analog of the analog computer in the digital domain. That’s what that’s basically what Grossman and Kelly work on, right? Yeah,

Ben Lindquist  36:38

Essentially, they thought of this as a kind of simulation of a simulation, right? Because they were simulating, they describe their project as a simulation of an analog Talking Machine, which is, of course, a device that simulates speech.

Mack Hagood  36:50

[Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two) faintly playing in background] So this is the work that led to the recording of Daisy Bell that Stanley Kubrick heard when he came to Bell Labs, the the song that eventually made its way into 2001, A Space Odyssey. And by the way, one of the things that sort of United, Ben and I and one of the ways we got to know each other is through our mutual interest in this guy Gerstmann Lewis Gerstmann generally gets left out of this history. If you just go on the internet, and you look at who taught the computer to sing, or the Daisy Bell story, you’ll see Larry Kelly and Carol Lauchbaum mentioned and Carol Lauchbaum was Kelly’s Assistant, I’m sure she was a wonderful person. 

But in truth, she was not the person who developed this work, it was Louis Gerstmann, Gerstmann and Kelly are painstakingly creating this model of the analog model of human speech. And they were working on this huge room sized IBM mainframe computer, they would have to input instructions very slowly. using punch cards, the computer would process the punch card instructions, and then it would output information onto a digital magnetic tape. But that magnetic tape would have to be running at an extremely slow speed because the processing power of that mainframe computer was paltry by today’s standards. 

And then he would output this information to digital magnetic tape. And they would have to use this newly invented thing by Max Matthews called a digital to analog converter to convert the digits on the tape into sound that could be recorded onto an analog tape. And so every time that they changed the model of speech to try to tweak something, they would have to go through this long painstaking process to do so.

Ben Lindquist  39:00

Max Matthews or others who wrote about early computer music talk about this a lot, you know, the problem with the the slow feedback loop. So if I’m learning to play the violin, it might be a slow and arduous process. But as soon as I can hear the chord here was discordant or not discordant, and make the appropriate adjustments. But the problem that they had both with speech and music was that it would take a few days after they would hear whatever it was that they put the paper down in actual sound. And as a result, this is kind of used as the sort of excuse for why for example, the earliest instances of computer music the famous album music from mathematics at Bell Labs released in I think 1961 sounded so bad, right? 

They said like Well, it’s interesting theoretically, and this is this is where the future lies they thought but for the moment because the feedback loop is so slow, and it makes it really really difficult to master this machine in the way that we can now master analog instrument that for now it’s More about the idea than it is about the actual sound. Yeah.

Mack Hagood  40:03

And so, you know, by the time in the 1960s, when they did create this recording of A Bicycle Built for Two, I mean, it’s hard to overstate what an accomplishment this was. Because not only did they have to get all the phonetics right, they also had to do pitch. And then Max Matthews creates the musical accompaniment over which the voices sing. 

And all of that has to be temporally tight, right? Like the voice and the music have to happen together. And all of this, as you say, when there’s such a slow feedback loop, where you have to wait, literally like days in order to hear what you did. I mean, this must have been incredibly difficult, incredibly tedious. And it’s also I think, just for even for people who do know this history, I think for a lot of people, they get the idea that the computer was just singing, or the computer was just playing music in real time, it couldn’t be further from the case, the computer was very, very slowly putting out these musical notes, these individual bits of speech.

 And a magnetic tape was running extremely slowly capturing these sounds, so that when you played it back at normal speed, suddenly you would have a performance that sounded like the computer was actually speaking in real time. And it was going to be many years before we could get into the era that we’re in now where computers actually could speak in real time. But that completely gets alighted, you know? So basically, what I’m saying is Kubrick heard a recording, he heard a recording of the Daisy Bell performance. He didn’t hear the computer do Daisy Bell, but in Yeah, in the cultural imagination, how is singing in real time? It would be decades before we could actually catch up to that.

Ben Lindquist  42:00

So while it kind of gave the impression of this sort of push button, automatic automated future, what was actually being heard was something that had been finished previously. So if Kubrick had said, Well, can you program this song? Have your IBM sing a rendition of my favorite Beatles tune? Or can you say “Hi, Stanley Kubrick? How are you today” that wouldn’t have been possible or it would have taken at least a few weeks before the computer could have responded to that input. 

And so yeah, it was quite a difficult process. It was like the result of a few years of very hard work and 10 years prior work at Haskins lab, developing the rules that were used by Bell Labs. 

Mack Hagood  42:44

And yet, despite all the decades of work, reducing human speech to its barest elements, trying to find the essential rules that would allow you to build up a new speaking voice from these bits and pieces. And despite the cultural influence that this method had, through HAL in 2001, A Space Odyssey, or even the prosthetic voice of Stephen Hawking, the phonemic approach of Louis Gerstmann turned out to be something of a dead end. 

You see, it was quite capable of synthesizing an intelligible voice, but it would never be capable of creating a natural sounding voice, a voice that might someday pass a vocal Turing test.

Ben Lindquist  43:31

Eventually what happens is they conclude that using this kind of speech that’s sort of built from scratch built from like the phoneme up just never really, it didn’t sound it never sounded as natural or as intelligible as they wanted it to. 

Yeah, so they started in the 1990s. They they moved over to this thing called diphone synthesis, where they would rebuild speech from tiny little adjacent half phonemes right so you don’t use phonemes but you use two half phonemes that’s the fundamental unit of speech and then using these you can recreate speech that sounds somewhat more natural, that sounds less computerized or like mechanical and this is the speech that Siri used. The problem with that is that to make sure that these little bits of speech fit together these voice actors who are used have to speak in a very sort of flat monotone emotionally impoverished tone. So eventually, like much more recently scientists have relied like everyone else on neural nets. These machines are this learning process that can create a much more complicated and intricate set of rules that rebuild speech

Mack Hagood  44:52

And scratch and like so many things, I believe, like we start off by saying, Okay, if we can just distill it into what the underlying set of rules are, then we can reproduce anything we want. But it seems like with so many things in the digital world, we eventually came to realize, well, if we could just amass a huge set of data, the computer itself can extrapolate a whole set of rules that we can’t even comprehend, but it’ll be able to reproduce the things we want. Am I kind of glossing over that? Correct? 

Ben Lindquist  45:25

I think that I think that gets at it fairly well, essentially, the rules were just especially if you want, not if you want to make speech that’s intelligible because speech was rules written by humans can create perfectly and do create perfectly intelligible speech. So you could think of Stephen Hawking’s voice, which, which is the most famous, I’d say, like the text to speech system from the 1980s. It was created by some MIT professor named Dennis Klatt, and it’s quite intelligible. It’s very intelligible , but it doesn’t sound natural, right? 

So the intricacy of the rules and the profundity of the linguistic knowledge required to write those rules is just beyond the power of linguists. Yeah, I think Do you know, the problem with rules, of course, is that you’re taking. When we think of speech, and we think of speech that’s natural, it’s, it sounds spontaneous, it’s surprising. It’s very dry. If it’s not like that, we can think of read speech as a semi kind of mechanical speech, which is difficult to listen to. It sounds almost machine like it’s much more rule bound actually, than spoken speech. 

The problem with spoken speech is that since it’s not read, since it’s spontaneous, it’s much harder to study. Yeah, right. So like speech, scientists realized after a point that one of the problems one of the reasons their devices sounded so mechanical, was that their knowledge of speech was based on the study of read speech, and read speech, just in a way it’s, in some ways, it’s not even speech, it should be thought of, they can read as more text like, right, it’s built from, from the phoneme up. And as a result, that’s just it, it doesn’t sound like speech.

Mack Hagood  47:06

And these so-called rules of speech. They are, you know, it’s basically like, we want to treat it like it’s a platonic ideal, and that all real lives, natural speech is just extrapolated from that. But it’s, in fact, that’s not the case. These are just approximations of patterns that have been observed. And yet real life never conforms neatly to them. 

It reminds me of the of the history of electronic music and synthesis, where people kind of extracted a set of rules about how sounds happen, okay, there’s, there’s a volume envelope, right, and there’s the sustain, there’s an attack, there’s a release, and you could construct a synthetic instrument that sounded a lot like a trumpet by following those so called rules of what trumpets do. But it never sounded really like a trumpet until people just said, Well, hey, why don’t we just sample the trumpet? We’ll take a recording of this on the trumpet. And then we’ll manipulate that recording and allow you to articulate what the trumpet does in a bunch of different ways, using the actual live sound of the trumpet rather than modeling the trumpet. 

Ben Lindquist  48:23

I think that gets back to my big takeaway. And I think that’s my big takeaway, namely, that the problem with creating a system of rules for something like speech is the more rule bound spontaneous speech is, the less that actually sounds like speech. 

So how do you create a set of rules for something that’s dynamic and fluid and unexpected and as rich and dynamic as speeches? And that’s like a really interesting and challenging problem. And that’s sort of the problem that I try to hash out in my forthcoming long, forthcoming, distantly forthcoming book.

Mack Hagood  49:00

Fantastic. Well, Ben, thank you so much for this conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it and best of luck going forward for you and working on that first book.

Ben Lindquist  49:14

Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun.

Mack Hagood  49:26

And that’s it for this episode of phantom power. Huge thanks to Benjamin Lindquist. You can find more information on Ben and find the link to his new paper in Critical Inquiry on the Art of Text to Speech in the show notes or on our website at phantompod.org where you can find all of our past episodes and so much more. 

And speaking of speaking, you can speak to me and to all of our listeners just go to speakpipe.com/phantom power and leave us a voice message. We’d love to hear from you. Today Show is edited by Nisso Sacha and me and our transcript and show page were by Katelyn Phan and our website SEO and social media by Devin Ankeney. I’ll talk to you again in two weeks. Bye

The post From HAL to SIRI: How Computers Learned to Speak (Benjamin Lindquist) appeared first on Phantom Power.

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Today’s episode provides a thorough walkthrough of the publishing industry for aspiring nonfiction writers. Our guest is Jane Von Mehren, Senior Partner at Aevitas Creative Management and a former Senior Vice President at Random House. Jane explains the structure of the publishing industry, how to take your area of expertise and start thinking about a public-facing book, what agents are for, what agents look for in authors, what you should look for in an agent, how to find an agent, how to write a query letter to an agent and how to craft a book proposal that your agent can shop to publishers. 

Our patrons will also hear a bonus segment that discusses how an agent shops your proposal to publishers and what happens after that. We also talk money—what kind of advances can first time authors expect? And we provide a number of concrete tips on how to write for a general audience. All of that plus our What’s Good segment where Jane shares something good to read, do and listen to. To get the full interview, just go to Patreon.com/phantompower .

[Robotic music] This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a podcast that usually focuses on sound. Today is a bit of an exception. We’re doing an episode that many of you reached out and asked for. My guest today is Jane Von Mehren. Jane is a senior partner at Avitus Creative Management. She is a former senior vice president at Random House. She’s been an editor and publishing executive at Houghton Mifflin and Penguin. And then there’s the least of her accomplishments: she’s also my new agent! Today, we’re going to do a thorough walkthrough of the publishing industry for aspiring nonfiction writers.

But before we get to that, a couple of quick notes:

Wow. I just feel like we’ve been cruising through this season with this twice-a-month schedule. It’s already March and it’s been a little while since I mentioned what’s coming up in two weeks. We will have recent Princeton PhD in history, Benjamin Lindquist. Ben’s going to be talking about the history of talking computers. Next up is Marie Thompson of the Open University, who just co-edited a new special issue of the journal Senses and Society on tinnitus and the aesthetics of tinnitus, so that should be an interesting conversation. I had some folks ask for more tinnitus material, so I’m looking forward to that one. And soon we’ll be chopping it up with Neil Verma of Northwestern. We’re going to talk about his brand new book on narrative podcasting.

I also want to remind you that we have a new feature where you can leave a comment, ask a question, or just say whatever you feel. Just go to speakpipe.com/phantom power, press the button, and start talking. I’d love to hear from you and maybe play your comments or questions on the show. So that’s speakpipe.com/phantom power.

 Okay. Onto today’s show. At the start of this season, I did an episode called “Going Public.” And in that episode, I talked about my interest in pivoting to more public writing and public scholarship. And I mentioned finding an agent and learning to navigate the space of non-academic publishing. And I heard from a number of you who said you’d like a deeper dive into that space. And so I asked Jane Von Mehren if she’d be willing to come on the show and basically give a primer on trade publishing and how to navigate that world as a first time author. Jane graciously said yes, and we really get into it today. If you listen to this episode, you will have an action plan by the end of the show. 

We talk about the structure of the publishing industry, how to take your area of expertise and start thinking about what a public-facing book might look like, what agents are for, what they look for in authors, what you should look for in them, how to find an agent, how to write a query letter to an agent, and how to craft a book proposal that your agent can shop to publishers.

Our patrons will also hear a bonus segment that discusses how an agent shops your proposal to publishers and what happens after that. We also talk money, like what kind of money are we talking about here in this world? Then we provide a number of concrete tips on how to actually write a book for a general audience. All of that, plus our “what’s good” segment where Jane shares something good to read, something good to do, and something good to listen to. To get that full interview with all the bonus content, just go to patreon.com/phantom power.

First, let me tell you a little bit about Jane. Something happened in her freshman English class. Jane von Maren read a poem that changed her life.

Jane von Mehren: I wrote a poem called “The Idea of Order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens. It was about the role of art and culture and how art can be a force of healing and of just making the world right in a way.

I became so focused and loved the poem so much that I completely changed my direction. I became an English major and I studied poetry for the rest of my college career, which turned out to be an amazing education for somebody who went into publishing, became an editor, because when you work on poetry, you’re learning to look at a work as a whole at the same time that you’re looking at it line by line, learning about this way in which the whole and the parts relate, which turned out to be an incredible education for somebody who works with writers and editing and things like that.

Mack Hagood: The summer after Jane’s junior year, she got a job as an Editorial Assistant at Crown Publishers.

 And though she did finish up her degree, she really never left the publishing world from that day on. 

Jane von Mehren: It was very clear to me within weeks that I loved the job. It was a combination of working with the writers, which was really fun, but also beginning to see two things about publishing. 

One is that it is a team effort. So many other people are involved, whether it’s the production people who help you get a manuscript ready to go to the printer with the copy editing and all of that kind of thing.

Then there are the production people who design the pages. What is it going to look like? There are the sales and marketing and publicity people. The other thing that I think was very surprising was that the job is also a sales job. Much of your job as an editor is convincing other people that this book is worth their time, worth their money. 

Trade publishing, in particular, is a business first and foremost. And although everybody who goes into it goes into it because they want to be able to publish amazing books, at the end of the day, we all have to make money. 

The business has to make money, and that’s a hard thing to learn about and to figure out.

Mack Hagood: A hard thing to figure out, but one that Jane excelled at. Going up through the ranks in her early years. 

Jane von Mehren: When you go into editorial, you start as an editorial assistant, and then there are these steps that you go up. 

You become an assistant editor, and then an associate editor, then an editor, senior editor, executive editor, editorial director, editor in chief. Those are all the sort of steps. And so I did all of those things pretty much. 

Mack Hagood: While Jane slowly moved up from editorial assistant to senior vice president and publisher at Random House, the industry was changing. Reading habits were changing. 

Bookstores were consolidating, e-books looked like the next big thing, and of course, Amazon rose up and started throwing its weight around. Publishers often responded with belt tightening.

Jane von Mehren: They decided not to have a trade paperback publisher. I lost my job. 

Mack Hagood: After decades of working in the publishing arena and rising to the top of the game, Jane was suddenly on the sidelines. 

Jane von Mehren: It was a moment where I really had a chance to stop and think, what do I want to do with my life?

 I’d gone up this ladder and done really well, but you know, my job at Random House was so much about budgets and schedules and co-op programs, and not about what are the books, who are the authors that I want to work with. So that was the moment when I became an agent. 

Mack Hagood: Today, Jane von Maren is Senior Partner at Avitus Creative Management, a literary agency that represents everyone from award-winning fiction and non-fiction authors to celebrities.

I think what I’d like to do at this point is perhaps lay out a toolkit for aspiring nonfiction authors in our audience, with an emphasis on those who have already been writing in the academic world because a lot of our listeners have been doing that.

 And then also to some extent, you know, people who are working in the space of sound or music or media because that’s definitely the interest of most of our listeners.

 So I thought maybe we could start off with the lay of the land in the publishing industry and then we could move on to more of the writing side of things. 

Jane von Mehren: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right. Sure. 

Mack Hagood: So let’s talk about presses. You know, there are academic presses. There are trade presses.

 Maybe there are presses that are somewhere in between. Could you talk a little bit about that situation?

Jane von Mehren: So as you point out, there are academic presses and there are trade presses.

 I think the major difference between the two is that an academic press is usually most focused on publishing work that contributes to an academic discipline, that they are a that the work be new, that the work be, you know, and again, in addition to what is already out there.

Some academic presses also have financial imperatives, while others do not. So, that part of it is usually less important in terms of making acquisition decisions about why they’re acquiring something. 

And then there are academic presses that also don’t pay in advance; they only pay royalties, so that can also be different. Many academic presses also don’t have a huge, what we would call, bookstore or trade distribution. 

You wouldn’t find a lot of those books necessarily in Barnes & Noble, for example, whereas a trade press is really about books that are for a general audience and are going to be sold through regular retail bookstores, whether it’s Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or your local independent bookstore. 

They also sell books through what is called the mass market channel, which includes Target, Costco, places like that, and airport stores. Not every book goes through those channels, but some of them do.

Mack Hagood: Mm.

Jane von Mehren: And there are even some books that will be sold, let’s say, in Urban Outfitters or places like that, which are more gifty-type things.

 Now, the sort of middle, the sort of press that’s in between the academic press and the trade press, I think does exist, and it really has to do with editorial focus. They’re still trade presses. 

And so, the one that comes to mind most readily is Basic Books. And Basic Books is part of the Hachette Book Group, which is one of the big five publishers. 

And yet, most of their authors are academics, and they are looking for books that really contribute to the conversation, or and their hope is to have those books be important in the academic setting but also be important in the trade, among general readers.

 They’re not necessarily looking to have a number one bestseller all the time, but they are looking to have books that are serious and rigorous and that add to the conversation.

Mack Hagood: Would Verso be another example of a press that’s kind of respected by academics but also read by non-academics?

Jane von Mehren: Yes, although I think they also have a focus as much on having books that have real rigor and things like that, but they also have a sort of point of view about the kinds of books that they publish. 

The same as Bold Type Books, right? Bold Type, which used to be Nation Books, that’s somewhat leftist, somewhat political, that kind of thing.

Mack Hagood: You know, um, I guess it was almost a year ago now, actually, I went to a writer’s workshop at the Jackman Institute for the Humanities at the University of Toronto. And it was this really amazing workshop where a bunch of academics who had published academic books but were now thinking about writing for the public were assembled.

 It was led by Gretchen Baca and Evelyn Jago. And I learned a ton, made some really great friends, people working on really interesting stuff. But I remember with the opening of that workshop, they were kind of talking about the differences between academic presses and trade presses.

 And they said, most of you in this room are going to be tempted and are going to want to write a crossover book that appeals to both academics and non-academics because you want to reach a wider audience, but you’re not ready to let go of that academic audience and the respect that they would have for your work.

 But they’re like, this is extremely difficult to do, and that you’re probably going to wind up with a book that non-academics can’t read and academics don’t respect. And they were basically saying, like, pick a lane, you know? And I was comfortable with that. I really wanted to write for a general audience. But I wonder your opinion. First of all, do you agree with that dichotomy? Yeah.

Jane von Mehren: Yes, I do. I think that there are times when academic writers feel that they need credibility or to be respected by their academic peers in an academic way, and that often means a book that is not accessible to most general readers. And so you do kind of have to pick a lane. It is pretty difficult. And I think that one of the things that is different about a trade book is that you are writing for a general reader and you have to write things that will appeal to them in one way or another, which does not mean that you have to not have rigor or high standards or have complexity.

It just means you have to speak and write in language that is free of jargon, that is accessible to a wider group of people. And I think that for some people, it’s very hard leaving behind the sort of structure that you get from certain kinds of academic language and ways of putting together arguments that are very natural and comfortable in an academic setting, whether it’s a paper or an academic book. In a trade book, those just aren’t going to work.

Mack Hagood: You know, I had sort of a commercial writing background before I went to grad school, and there was a kind of writing that I learned to do in grad school, which is extremely defensive.

 Right? Like you’re couching every claim, saying, “Well, of course there are these three exceptions. Of course, folks, I know, I know.” You know, like you’re just waiting for people to poke holes in your argument, and it makes a lot of sense as an academic to do that, but it’s extremely tedious for a non-academic to have to read that. 

Like, I think, yeah. For a general audience person, they’ll see a PhD behind your name and they’re probably like, “Okay, I believe you know what you’re talking about. Just tell me what you want to say.” Right? Like, and make it interesting. Like maybe put it in a story rather than some kind of terse academic language.

Jane von Mehren: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I think that’s right. I think people, readers who come to a general trade book aren’t looking to poke holes in it, which is not to say that some people don’t. 

You know, some people will say, “Oh, well, I don’t believe this” or “I take issue with this,” but that’s not the agenda. Whereas I think sometimes among academics, when you’re reading something, you’re reading it to sort of see how does it fit into what you know about this subject or how does it relate to the work that you’re doing, and so there’s probably a lot more sort of compare and contrast that’s going on simply as you’re reading something. I’m intuiting that. I may be wrong about that, but it seems to make sense.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s a gamble. It’s a pivot to a different audience, and your former audience is going to look at that and say, “Hey, what about us? Are you no longer a serious part of our community?”

 Like that’s a risk. That’s a bit of a loss. And that’s probably not for most academics. Most of us probably aren’t going to want to do that, which is fine. But I think that sense that, “Oh, well, I can have it both ways,” it’s just going to be a huge temptation because of that.

Jane von Mehren: Right. So, I guess I have a question about that, which is, by writing a book for a general audience, it doesn’t seem as if you necessarily need to exile yourself from an academic world.

It’s just this particular work is going to be for a general audience. You could presumably still be writing for an academic audience, right?

Mack Hagood: Yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely true. I don’t want to overstate the decision, but I think because our time is so limited, there are so many other things that are on our plate besides just doing our research.

 You are kind of committing to a whole book, that’s probably a year or two that you’re just not going to really be able to devote to your usual mode of scholarship.

Jane von Mehren: Mm-hmm, mm.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Okay, so let’s say you’re a person who has decided, I do want to make this pivot and I’m going to be looking at the trade press world. 

Are there certain categories of books that tend to do better than others, that are maybe more legible to non-experts or have more of a built-in audience that a sort of media or music writer might gravitate towards?

Jane von Mehren: That’s a really interesting question and a hard one to answer because it changes. I think there’ll be certain periods of time when there are lots of books that are in one vein and then people pivot because it’s been done. So let’s say lots and lots of memoir-type books and then people don’t want the personal voice. 

They want something that’s more grounded in research or, and then they think, “Oh, we want something else.” So I think it’s hard to answer. In terms of music and media, I think that there have always been lots of books about music, everything from musicians writing about their own work or their own lives to people writing about music, whether somebody like Ann Powers, the music critic who’s done a lot of writing about music and things like that, to even the business of music and things like that.

Media is also something people write about a lot. Sometimes it’s more from a business perspective, discussing the rise of a particular kind of media. Then there are critiques of it. I think right now lots of people are writing about AI, which is not quite media, but obviously impacts all of that. 

Again, these things are cyclical. It depends on what’s in the air and the zeitgeist, what people are drawn to and interested in. But I think one of the things about writers and about people who are experts is that they have expertise. 

The trick, in a way, for a trade publisher is to give an editor the sense of why this expertise, why this book matters, why, you know, what is it adding to the conversation that’s going on right now?

 Why is what you have to say really important? And why are you the person to bring this part of the conversation forward and make it feel urgent and important in the moment? The moment that we’re in is very compelling to an editor.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, I’m thinking about certain kinds of books that maybe have a little bit of a built-in audience. So like you talked about music, like a music book could be sold at a record store as well as a bookstore.

Jane von Mehren: Mm hmm.

Mack Hagood: Especially if it’s sort of pitched towards a particular genre or audience, like an artist. So I was just down in New Orleans and I went to one of the bookstores I like down there, and there’s just a New Orleans section right when you walk in, and that’s what I was looking for, right.

Jane von Mehren: Yep.

Mack Hagood: So, so I think those kinds of things, like if you’re thinking, you could maybe think about how could my research expertise be framed in such a way that it makes sense in one of those spaces, perhaps?

Jane von Mehren: Absolutely. I think it really also depends on what your research expertise is. So for example, if you, you know, does it make sense to focus on a particular place? There’s a strength to that. 

And so if you have a book that is really going to highlight, say, something that happened in New Orleans and let’s say it’s about music, you have an area from which to grow, right? New Orleans is a great place to launch because it’s connected, but, but you also, it’s also recognized that.

You know, New Orleans is a place where certain kinds of music come from, so the fact that it’s also about music gives you that broader, more national audience.

You don’t want something that is so narrow in scope that it feels as if only New Orleans is going to be interested in it, if that makes sense.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I suppose another possibility, and again, this is like, gets into that trying to thread the needle, I suppose, between academic and non-academic, but people who are coming from an academic background, could they be thinking about, okay, this is a trade press book, it’s written for a general audience, but it could also be useful in an intro class on X.

Jane von Mehren: Yes.

Mack Hagood: That’s something people might want to consider? Hmm.

Jane von Mehren: Wise to think about, especially for somebody who is an academic, and there are publishers who are particularly adept at making sure that their books are seen by university professors, college professors.

 Norton is one of them, obviously, since they have a huge textbook arm themselves. Penguin Random House has long had a very strong academic reach into both high schools and the college arena.

 In fact, when I was at Penguin, they really, literally had two sales reps who would travel the country talking to professors about Penguin books. They weren’t trying to sell them. They were just saying, “Hey, we have this book. Would you be interested?” 

And we also actually got great ideas for books from their reports. It was incredible. They would say, “I was talking to so-and-so, and there was really a need for a book about X,” and somebody would think, “Oh, that’s interesting. Let me see what I can do.”

 So I’m not sure if they have those reps anymore, but it was really fun. And most of the biggest publishers, HarperCollins, Simon Schuster, Macmillan Hachette, and Penguin Random House do have some kind of marketing that is focused on schools and universities. Yeah.

Mack Hagood: Let’s say at this point, you’ve decided you’re doing this trade press lane, you’ve thought about, you know, what general niche you might want to be going for. What do you do next?

Jane von Mehren: Right. Right. So I think two things have to happen. One is you have to have some sense of what the book is or what you want to write about because when you approach an agent, you’re going to want to approach them with something in mind. 

That usually happens in the form of a query letter. So you’re writing to somebody and saying, you know, I’m Mack Hagood. I work here. This is my specialization. I want to write a book about X. 

Sort of being able to give a sense of what that book is in a few sentences that are very compelling and a sense of, you know, what kind of exposure you’ve had to a trade marketplace before, whether it’s being interviewed by the Washington Post or having your work written about on thomaslou.com or some other place. 

Or you’ve written a bunch of pieces that have appeared in academic journals. Those are also useful. What you’re trying to give is a sense of who you are in the world. And then you can send that off. 

And most of those query letters are done by email. And one of the questions I often get is, well, how do I know who to send to? And that’s a really good question because you do want to send to somebody who is going to be open to the kind of work that you’re doing. 

And one of the things that I always tell people to do is go and look at the acknowledgements in books that are similar to the kind of book you think you want to write. It doesn’t have to be exactly in your subject area, but sort of have the kind of seriousness that whatever, how general market is it versus a little bit more academic what the writing level is and things like that. Go and look at the acknowledgements and see who’s there. 

That’s one way of figuring it out. Another way is there is an organization called Publishers Marketplace, which some of it is free. Some of it you have to subscribe to, but you put publishersmarketplace.com and you will get to it. 

And it has all this incredible information about who buys what kind of books how, and then what’s their, you know, what agent’s email addresses are, not everybody’s email addresses are on there, but a lot are and so it can give you it’s a great way of getting information and then how to figure out how to get in touch with people. And those are really. Really good ways. 

Another way is to talk to people, you know, do you know people who have been published in the trade area? Do they have agents? Kind of ask people and you can get connections that way. I mean, the way that you and I met is pretty unusual. You should tell that story, Mac.

Mack Hagood: Basically, the very short story is I was being interviewed by a reporter from the Washington Post and I just mentioned that I was thinking of writing a trade press book, and she’s like, you should meet my agent. And that was like, which Yeah, I mean, I don’t know how common that is, but I, but I.

Jane von Mehren: Right, it is, yeah.

Mack Hagood: The idea though is that it’s these social connections that you could think about, who do I know who is publishing now? And could I approach them and ask them about.

Jane von Mehren: Right Exactly. Exactly. And you know, and in our case, the reporter who was interviewing you wrote to me and said, I just interviewed the most amazing guy. He wants to do a trade book.

 Do you want to be introduced? And so, and I said, yes. So and the, the, the truth is that that kind of referral happens a lot. I get a lot of clients from people I’ve published or people I represent who say, Oh, I know somebody who’s interested in doing this. And would you like to meet them? Which is great. 

And then there are also people that I represent who I reach out to myself. I have read something where they’re quoted or they’ve written a piece that I found really interesting and then I reach out to them. 

So that happens too, particularly early on in your agenting career when you don’t have a lot of, you know, there aren’t tons of people referring things to you. And so it’s and it’s really fun.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, I feel, I feel like I should credit the person who introduced it is Stacey, Stacey Colino. And she is actually someone that you work with, right? 

Jane von Mehren: Yes, she’s my client. Stacey is somebody who often works with experts and helps them write their books. 

So the first book that we worked on together was a book that she wrote with Shana Swan, who is a worldwide famous epidemiologist, and she’s done a lot of work about falling sperm counts and what that means for men and also humankind. 

So we did that book, and she’s done a lot of different things. She’s just an incredible science and health and wellness reporter and has been great to work with. So, and has very good instincts also for who would make good writers. 

Mack Hagood: I can also say that I did pursue the Publisher’s Marketplace, which is really fascinating, like a wormhole that you can lose weeks in, if you allow yourself to.

 It’s a little overwhelming, the amount of information that’s out there, but just like searching for your favorite nonfiction authors and finding out who their agents are. And there’s even this really very strange coded language about how much money each project sold for, allegedly. 

I mean, I don’t know how much to believe these things that you see in Publisher’s Marketplace, but somebody has to disclose these numbers. I don’t know who’s disclosing, if it’s the agent or the author or probably not the publisher, right?

Jane von Mehren: A book deal comes out without any kind of disclosure of how much money is involved. 

From my perspective as an agent, I think it’s nobody’s business. It’s the author’s business and, you know, they don’t necessarily need to know why. How much a book sold.

 Other people don’t need to know. And although there are times when a publisher or an agent will want to sort of indicate that it’s sold for a lot of money because One of the ways in which Publisher’s Marketplace is used is that foreign publishers will look at what has sold.

 Movie and TV people look at it. So there are times when you’re trying to signal the rest of the marketplace or other parts of the marketplace by what you say in the sales announcement. So that can be why it’s there. And most people, they’re accurate, but the ranges, the good sale versus the, I can’t even, I rarely put in the numbers. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah, yeah,

Jane von Mehren: I don’t remember all of these.

Mack Hagood: The terminology is something like a nice deal, a very nice deal. It’s really funny.

Jane von Mehren: Exactly. Exactly. Yes. Amount of money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, yeah, it really is. 

Jane von Mehren: Exactly. It is. So, but so, and then once you send out that query letter, what is the next step? 

So hopefully, you get a response. And one of the things that are probably really hard is that a lot of times you don’t. I, as an agent, do try to respond, but sometimes it’s just, you know, you get so many emails a day and don’t necessarily, you can’t necessarily respond. 

So I don’t, I sometimes don’t, I try to, but I sometimes don’t. And then if you do get a, you know, Oh, I’m interested in this, send me what you have. So with nonfiction, you’re selling your book most often.

 Using a proposal and that process, that proposal process is sort of an art form because it’s a document that serves a bunch of different purposes. It is both a sales document and an editorial document and a kind of mission statement and getting all of the elements of it.

Put together is tricky, but you should have something That is a little bit longer than your query letter to be able to send to show What the writing is like and what you’re thinking about for the book and so and if you don’t You know, there are agents who will work with you from the ground up, often They’ll want you to have something Yeah,

Mack Hagood: So in my case, I had the application that I wrote for the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Grant. 

And I just sort of took off some of the more academic edges of that. And basically had that available so that when you asked me, you said you were interested in seeing more, I think I sent you some version of that thing, which sort of gave you a pretty good sense of it. 

And I mean, maybe we should clarify your, I mean, the relationship between an agent and an author.

 Certainly one hopes there will be an ongoing relationship that could span numerous books, but in the beginning, you’re really selling one particular project, right? So this is really about, I’m pitching this particular book and how do you as an agent, because you know, you work on commission, so you need to be placing good bets on books that are going to reward your time financially.

Jane von Mehren: Mm-hmm.

Mack Hagood: How do you decide who you’re going to work with? What project looks good to you based on these query letters or other ways that you meet authors?

Jane von Mehren: That’s a great question. I think part of what makes being an agent an amazing job is that you are able to work on anything you want. So part of it is I read something and I think, “Oh, this is so interesting. This is so exciting. I really like the sound of this.”

First and foremost is, am I interested? Partly because the time that you’re going to put in over, you know, over the next however many months, possibly years, is significant. 

And so you have to feel enough excitement and interest to want to do that. And then I think there’s also a sense of knowing how publishers think and thinking about how does this particular idea seem in terms of what people are looking for, what people are interested in, what’s going on in the world at the moment. Are there books like it that I can think of?

 When I’m reading it, do I think, “Oh, so-and-so editor is going to love this?” Do I immediately start thinking about who are the editors who are going to be potential buyers of the book? So it’s things like that. Have I done something in this space before?

 There are certain, I think each one of us as agents develop areas that we’re interested in, and you kind of end up having authors who kind of fit into sort of groups. 

They’re not all doing the exact same things, but you can see how they’re connected. So, for example, when we first spoke, I think I spoke to you about this book called Golden, which is about the power of silence, right?

 It’s related but not exactly what you’re doing, but it was in a world that seems similar. I could see how the dots connected and it also was something really interesting to me. 

Mack Hagood: That’s a book by Justin Zorn and Lee Mars. And that’s one that you successfully sold.

Jane von Mehren: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had an auction for it, and it went really well. It was published by Harper at HarperCollins. Yep.

Mack Hagood: That’s great. I’ve dipped into it a little bit, but I’ve held back from actually reading it because I didn’t want to get too influenced by it.

Jane von Mehren: That’s fine. No, and it’s funny because, you know, then you read the book and you think, and particularly me, as somebody who was an editor for many years, there’s sort of choices that you think, “Oh, would I have done that, or might I have wanted them to do slightly different things with, you know, as they were developing the book, you know, once it was sold?”

 Some things changed from the proposal and things like that, which happens, and that’s appropriate because ultimately once the proposal is done and you’re working with an editor, then it is the editor who needs to drive that, the editorial process.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, yeah, and I definitely want to talk about that more a little bit later, but I did notice in the book that they seem to make a move that is a little different from what we usually do in the academic world, but seems to be a very common move in nonfiction where they kind of tell the story of how they got interested in this subject matter and like how it sort of captured them that they almost set up like a little mini crisis in the introduction and then they realized that they were able to sort of transcend this problem through embracing silence, which sort of clarifies what the topic of the book is about but also kind of sets up the stakes for it and gives a narrative entryway for the reader. Like, “Oh, this is interesting. I see how they got into this.”

Jane von Mehren: Yeah, it’s a strategy now that, you know, I noticed certain strategies that authors use in trade press books, and that seems to be one of them.

Mack Hagood: Yes, I think that’s right. I think it’s a way in which authors can lay out what the book is about, what they’re exploring, and doing it in a way that the reader can identify with. “I may be an expert, but I’m a human being like you, and I’m dealing with the same issues out in the world that you are.”

Mack Hagood: So, yeah, yeah, it’s a different strategy. But maybe we can get back into talking about your process of thinking about who’s an author that I want to work with when I was sort of doing research online I found this rather intimidating and, for some reason, to me depressing word kept popping up, which was platform, that an author needs to have a platform. Can you talk a little bit about that, what that is and does that factor into your considerations as well?

Jane von Mehren: Platform is a word that publishers and agents talk about all the time. And what it means is what are the things that you as an author bring with you that will help you get the word out there about the book, connect to your audience, and kind of help the publisher publish the book in a way so that the book will sell more copies.

And it ranges widely. So it can be the fact that you have been interviewed by various journalists, and therefore you have a connection, you have a relationship with some of these journalists, and when your book is published, you’ll be able to reach out to them and say, “Hey, I’ve just published this book, I’d love you to, you know, I’m gonna have my publisher send you a copy, I’d love it if you, you know, took a look, you want to write about it, that would be great,” or whatever. 

It may be that you’re out there doing lectures all the time, and so you have that kind of audience, and if you’re doing lots of lecturing and talks, you can sell books perhaps. It may be that you have a podcast, and you know, the podcast will help you to get the word out about the book.

All of these things are ways in which you, as an author, bring this platform, this ability to say, “I’m not just Jane Von Mehren, I’m Jane Von Mehren, who is also well known by these journalists, and I have connections with them, and so they’ll help get the word out.” So who do you know? 

What are the things that you have access to that can help you get the word out about the book so that it will sell more copies? And it’s a variety of things. For example, you’re an academic.

Is your institution interested in helping get the word out? There’s all kinds of things. So do I think about it? Yes, I do. And I think about it because publishers think about it. 

There’s nothing worse than having somebody say to you, “Well, this is so interesting, but this person has no platform.” And the platform question has become more and more important because there are fewer book reviews, there are fewer physical bookstores that people are going into to just see books. It’s a lot harder to make people aware of books than it used to be. 

So the fact that you, as an author, have the ability to reach out to an audience who is going to be interested in what you’re writing about, is really important. That is very meaningful to a publisher because it helps them be able to do more.

Mack Hagood: Well, I think the large variety of things that you put on the table there, and the fact that none of them were social media, I think makes it much less depressing to me when I said that.

Because I have seen, you know, some, and this probably varies by genre of book, but I have certainly seen people who seem to equate platform with how many followers do you have on Instagram? Yeah. And for me, that’s very few. 

Jane von Mehren: Right, right. So I will say that social media is one way to have a platform, and I will give credit to publishers for having become more sophisticated about the way that they look at social media because it’s not just how many followers you have, but are they engaged? 

You know, you could have a million followers. But if none of them are actually engaging with you or only a small percentage, it doesn’t really matter, right? It’s not meaningful. 

So I think that’s definitely something that has changed. There’s also the fact that maybe you don’t have a huge social media platform, but you know five people who do, who are huge supporters of your work, and who have very engaged followings. 

That can be as meaningful as anything else. So there are lots of things, you know, and I think the other thing that publishers will tell you is that if social media is not your thing, if you don’t feel comfortable doing that, then you shouldn’t because authenticity is really important and being able to engage is really important and if you don’t want to do that, then you’re not really going to be able to build a following there and you’re just wasting your time. 

So there are probably kinds of, you know, for example, if you’re doing cookbooks or you’re doing lifestyle kind of stuff, you probably do need to be on Instagram and connecting with people because people are looking at those pictures and all of that kind of stuff. But for many people, social media per se is not the only way to have a platform.

Mack Hagood: I think that’s so helpful, especially that piece about authenticity with social media. I think the wasting time, just trying to get your numbers up. I think that comes across. And I also think there’s just something strange. Like voodoo or mojo with social media that I don’t have, it’s just not a space where I spend much time. I love having conversations like podcasting for me. It’s a one-on-one thing. 

It feels intimate. I learn so much from doing it like that is something I can easily spend my time on. Engaging on social media. It just feels like a chore to me so I’m glad to hear there are other options, but for some of our listeners, you know, they’re really great on social media so I guess the lesson here is play to your strengths and what feels right what comes naturally?

Jane von Mehren: Yes, I think that’s exactly right. That’s

Mack Hagood: We’ve talked a lot about the agent side of the equation, what the agent is looking for in the author. What should the author be looking for in an agent?

Jane von Mehren: A great question. So I think one thing about the author-agent relationship is that ideally, as you pointed out, it lasts for many books, so you’re hopefully signing on for a long-term relationship, and so you want to feel comfortable. 

Not only does this person understand your work, but does this person understand what I want from this? Not everybody is necessarily looking to get the most amount of money for a book or there are reasons that having a book come out at a certain time is really important. 

You want an agent who is going to understand those things and be able to work with you on those things. It’s not that an agent is necessarily going to be able to do everything that you want. But you want them to at least be on the same page and everybody working towards the same thing. 

So I had a client who was up for tenure, so it was really important that we sold his book. Luckily we did that. Um, but it, so for his tenure decision, it was really important that he had this book under contract. And so that was great. I had, you know, that can be one thing.

Mack Hagood: I mentioned to you, but I’m kind of in that situation too, except it’s for a full-time professor, so yeah, I got to get this proposal done.

Jane von Mehren: Done. Okay. Okay. There we go. So there, but there are things like that and then, you know, and sometimes being published by a particular publisher might be really important to you, so, you know, maybe that means that you accept less money than somebody else because you really want to be with a particular publisher or a particular editor.

An agent I think you asked me that question if there was a particular, and I felt pretty undistinguished in that I had no preference at all. I was like most people.

Mack Hagood: Most, most people don’t, I will tell you that most people don’t have a preference, so you are not alone. 

And the other thing is that you want somebody that you feel that you can really. Talk with and be, you know, and be able to be very transparent. Your agent is an advisor. 

So you want somebody who’s gonna be able to not only say, “Oh, this is how we can do what you want to do.” But also somebody who’ll say, “You know, I understand why you want to do that. 

But actually It’s not the right move for you. And here’s why.” And things like that. You want somebody who’s an advocate, but who’s also willing and able to be clear about. Why something makes sense or doesn’t make sense.

Mack Hagood: Yeah.

Jane von Mehren: Jane von Mehren: So I think there’s that. And I think having somebody who’s had experience inside a publishing company is really helpful.

Mack Hagood: Right.

Jane von Mehren: Not necessary, but I certainly find I’m surprised by some things that I know that even colleagues who have been agents as long as I’ve been in publishing, so for decades, things about the workings in-house that they don’t know, that I would have thought they would have known so.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Working with you, I mean, seemed like such a no-brainer in a sense, because you had all of this experience and, you know, I just felt like we had a really good rapport, and I felt comfortable talking to you. I could understand what you were saying, all those.

Jane von Mehren: Mm-hmm. Mm.

Mack Hagood: You know, I spoke to some other agents, and there are differing experiences there.

Everyone had different strengths and weaknesses. I just wonder, like for people who are maybe weighing like maybe somebody who has less experience than you, but the rapport is really good.

Or conversely, somebody who has tons of experience, has sold tons of books, but maybe that rapport isn’t there as much, right? Like I feel like with you, there was a sweet spot where I could, the middle of the Venn diagram was there, but I think for maybe a lot of people, there might be a kind of choice that if they’re lucky enough to have a couple of agents interested, they might need to choose between those two scenarios.

Do you have any thoughts about that?

Jane von Mehren: I think the one thing that I would say is you want to have a clear sense of how the agent likes to work and so that you get a sense of is this somebody I’m going to be able to get in touch with and have them respond to me. Is this somebody who I can ask all my, you know, seemingly dumb questions, but there are no dumb questions, but you know, that was going to have the time and the patience to do that. 

Is this somebody who understands what my book is or what I’m trying to do? So I think it’s that kind of thing. I think somebody who’s younger and hungrier sometimes can be the right choice because they’re younger and hungrier and they have more, you know, they have fewer clients.

They’re excited about moving forward and that can be a great option. Somebody who’s been at it a long time, and who does tons and tons of deals, can also be great. 

I think that that person, who’s done tons and tons of deals, and maybe there’s not so much rapport, what you want to make sure in that case is that they’re going to give you enough time that they’re going to be willing to because I think that sometimes happens that they’re the senior person and, you know, of course they can sell your book. But you’re not necessarily going to get the best sort of advising and the best attention from somebody like that.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, and I would reinforce that just based on my experience with friends who have had either prominent literary agents or prominent editors wound up feeling kind of like the small fish in the big pond and didn’t maybe get the attention. 

Either to help them craft the book into what they really felt like it could have been or perhaps didn’t get the strong marketing push from the publisher, even though they landed with a dream press.

Jane von Mehren: Yeah, I think all of those things are true when it comes to the publisher itself. A lot of the things that happen in the sort of marketing and publicity process and selling process are partly up to the editor and then partly completely out of control of the editor. 

And so it’s a tricky balance. And in fact, this is a place where your agent can be helpful both in terms of setting up realistic expectations and also, being able to ask the questions, facilitate the conversation so that you can get more of what is possible, you know, asking for, for a full-page ad in the New York Times is probably not possible. And so let’s not add, you know, let’s, let’s not go there, but,

Mack Hagood: That’s what we were doing for my book, but…

Jane von Mehren: But there are other things that are possible. And so let’s focus on those things, right? So yeah.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So let’s wrap up this piece about the industry and the agent and what happens with two last questions, which are what exactly is the proposal that you and the agent work on together? 

And then I want to know about it. After you’ve finished this proposal, what are you going to do with it? 

Jane von Mehren: Yeah. What happens? Okay. So the proposal itself is as I said, it’s this weird document that is a sales pitch, editorial, sort of example, exemplar, and a kind of mission statement. 

And I think I may have even described it to you like this when we first spoke. I often compare it to a set of blueprints for a house. And that first page, which is the overview, is that pretty picture of the outside of the house.

And it’s kind of the, You know, what is this book, why am I writing it, why now, who’s it for, and a little bit about what the structure of the book is. And then as you, you know, as you lift the pages you get inside and you see the plumbing, which might be about the author, and then there’s the electrical that might be the comps and the audience and, you know, and so on. 

Some other thing that’s the marketing and publicity plan and then you have sample material and chapter summaries which help the editor see how this big idea and sort of vision of the book that you’ve laid out in the overview is going to actually be realized in the course of the book and it’s a balance between what’s actually going to be in it sample sample writing and enough kind of promise of what you don’t want to put everything into the proposal that’s one of the weird things and chapter summaries is often a misnomer because you don’t want to summarize everything you want to sort of give a sense of here’s here’s what it’s going to be and I’m also going to talk about this this and this so that you keep you don’t want an editor to finish reading a proposal and think oh, that was great Thank you, you know on to the next you want them to think. Oh my god. That was so interesting. I need to know more So it’s this interesting balance

Mack Hagood: Things that jump out for me there, first of all, I mean. In contrast to a non or in contrast to a fiction book you’re not presenting the entire manuscript like it so this proposal is sort of like you said the blueprint that is going to Show what you’re going to do in the book. 

So I think one thing that I’ve noticed that academics tend to think is like, Oh, I’m going to write this book and then I’m going to find an agent and get this book published. 

Like that’s a little bit putting the cart before the horse, right? Because part of what you’re working with an agent for is for their expertise on what the market is interested in. 

And then how to pitch that and you might wind up writing a very different book from the one that you just wrote on your own because it has a scholarly import because you’re kind of not selling just scholarly import right like As you said a moment ago, there has to be a why a why now a who cares? Sort of dimension that you need to

Jane von Mehren: Yep,

Mack Hagood: Spell out in that proposal

Jane von Mehren: Yep, yep, exactly. That’s exactly right. And the other thing is that a proposal is potential, right? If you write the whole thing, then an editor can say, Oh, okay.

 I don’t, I don’t think this works. And whereas in a proposal, there’s still the opportunity to say, well, I’m not sure that this table of contents is in the right order, but it’s only a table of contents, right? 

You can change it. And so it’s all potential. And which is not to say that. You know, when you have a manuscript that the editor won’t edit it, but if you’re selling it based on a manuscript, it’s often more difficult. 

And, you know, for example, in fiction where you do have to sell a full manuscript, at least for your first book you often get people who will pass or they’ll say, you know, if you revise it, I will look again. 

Here are my thoughts. I, you know, but I’d be happy to look at it again. And so you have to go and revise it rather than buying the book and working with the author to edit it to make those revisions. 

So a proposal is a, it’s a really hard thing to do because you are juggling all of these different sorts of focuses and, and things that you have to do with a proposal, but at least you’re not writing the whole book. 

And once you have a proposal, you also have a terrific map for what you are going to do. So even if you end up changing some things, you still have something very strong to work from. 

Mack Hagood: As someone who is working on the proposal right now, it’s been really interesting to me. How similar it is to just straight up writing, right? I mean I’m coming up with the structure in advance in this way. 

I mean, it’s very clarifying. It’s a learning curve for me and it’s a challenge, you know, there’s a part of me that’s like, come on, I just want to get to writing the book. But, but on, on the other hand, it’s like, well, this is going to make writing the book so much easier. Because if someone buys this and signs onto it, and it’s like you said, I’ve got that blueprint. 

So, so you, you’ve got this proposal and then there are also sample chapters or a sample chapter is a, I’ve seen people say two chapters. I’ve seen people say one chapter, like where do you come down on that?

Jane von Mehren: So I think nowadays people want to be able to see what the book is without having to read a hundred pages, right? So if you can keep it to 60 or 75 pages, you’re in great, great shape. If it’s more, it’s fine, but being

Mack Hagood: The proposal and the sample chapter.

Jane von Mehren: Yeah. So if it’s more, it’s fine, particularly if it’s really fun to read the way yours is. And so I think one chapter is fine. 

There are some proposals that I have sold that do not have any sample chapters, but each of the sort of chapter summaries really feel like they begin with a kind of narrative that is kind of, might be in the book, and then you get to the end of it, and then there’s more of the kind of, in this chapter, I’ll do blah, blah, blah, blah. and so it really de, it depends on how good a writer you are, you know, and how effective you can be. But having a really good chapter.

Mack Hagood: I didn’t even know that was a possibility. That’s the way I’ve been trying to write my sample chapter description. So

Jane von Mehren: That’s great. Good.

Mack Hagood: Maybe I can get out of writing a sample chapter.

Jane von Mehren: Yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see. Absolutely. We will see. So that’s good. So I think usually nowadays one sample chapter is fine, particularly because the overview should also be in the voice, you know, should kind of be the voice that you’ll be using in the book. And so that also, you know, serves as a kind of sample of your writing there too.

Mack Hagood: So, you’re writing the proposal, the way you’re going to write the book, like if it—

Jane von Mehren: To a certain extent. Although there are places where you’re going to be very explicit and, you know, write in a way, in this book I will, which obviously in the book you would never do. So—

Mack Hagood: Right.

Jane von Mehren: That’s why it’s a weird document because you do both of those things.

Mack Hagood: So, okay. So we’ve got the—

Jane von Mehren: The—

Mack Hagood: The uh, proposal.

Now you’ve got the proposal. You’re satisfied with it. You’ve given a lot of feedback and the author has responded, and now it’s a nice polished document. What do you do with this thing? 

Jane von Mehren: When I get very close to having a document that I think is pretty much done, I will ask a colleague to read it. And that is because I want somebody who hasn’t been immersed in the process to read it the way an editor would, with fresh eyes, and sometimes that read surfaces something that is seemingly really obvious that I’ve missed, that you’ve missed, and you know, it happens.

And so it’s just a great sort of, what do you think, what would you add, what are— you know, I might be worried about something and I’ll ask, like, Has— you know, have we, is this convincing or etc.? And so once we do that and get it all put together, then I will start doing two things.

One is a submission list. Who am I going to go to? And I will probably have started it along the way as we get close. I start talking to editors about the project and sort of get some sense of what people might think. And then I start writing my pitch letter. So that’s me, positioning the project for the editor.

And I often think of it as being sort of like the way an editor would pitch the book to their sales, marketing, and publicity team. So it’s sort of positioning it for a publisher. And part of that letter will be at the end, I’ll say, you know, Would you please get back to me with your initial response by such and such a date because on such and such a week we’re going to introduce the author to interested publishers.

And that’s a way of creating a timeline. It doesn’t always— Sometimes it works that way, but sometimes it’s faster, sometimes it’s slower, but that’s the way it goes. And then also an expectation that, you know, that you will have, be having conversations with interested editors. And hopefully you, and then you have all of that done.

And then what I do is I write an email that says, “I’m so excited, I’m going out with this incredible project by my client, Mac Hagood, and then here’s, here’s what it’s called.” Sort of a sentence about what it is. My pitch letter is below. Please let me know if you’d like to see it because I want everybody to buy into getting it.

I don’t want to just send something out because you know, you have an inbox, I have an inbox, and you know what happens sometimes. So that way, you’ve made people buy into it. And then when I send it, I will say, “I’m so glad you want to look at it. Here it is. Please would you confirm that you safely got these pages so that I know that they’ve gotten it.”

And then if they don’t confirm, then I can go back and say, “I’m just checking. Did you get it?” And, yeah, so then, yeah, and so then you just wait for that first person to get back to you. I have one colleague who will start telling people that he’s getting responses even if somebody has rejected it.

I usually wait until somebody comes and says, “Oh, I really like this, but.” You know, and then you start telling me, “I’m just getting a response, checking in, not trying to rush you, but I’m hearing from people.” And then when I make that first meeting appointment, I will go back and say, “I’m starting to schedule meetings.

I’d love to add you to the schedule,” you know, that kind of thing. So you just want to do what you can to kind of create momentum.

Mack Hagood: Yeah.

Jane von Mehren: And then you go through the whole process. We have these meetings. Sometimes it’s one. Sometimes it’s three. Sometimes it’s 10. You never know. You have the meetings and shortly thereafter—

Mack Hagood: So, just to clarify, am I at this meeting or is it this?

Jane von Mehren: It’s about you. Yes, absolutely. Yes. You, yes, you are at the meeting. It is really the author and the editor. I’m there. I’m there, but I don’t do a lot of talking. Sometimes editors will bring marketing and publicity people. Sometimes it’s just the editors. We have these meetings afterward.

Mack Hagood: What do folks talk about at the meeting? They’ve seen the proposal already. They know what they—

Jane von Mehren: Mm hmm.

Mack Hagood: —know what you’re pitching.

Jane von Mehren: Yes. So they want to get a sense of the author, what they’re like, if they have questions about the proposal. Sometimes they want their marketing and publicity people to see an author. Sometimes you feel as if they’re asking you questions that were answered in the proposal and that’s very common. And partly that may be the editor asking questions in order to get you to talk about something they want their colleagues to hear.

Mack Hagood: Huh.

Jane von Mehren: And it’s also the opportunity for you to meet the editor, to find out about how they work with authors. Find out what the publishing company is like. So it’s mutual, you know, you’re looking at it from both perspectives. They’re looking at you and you’re looking at them. And so they are also trying to sell themselves to you.

Mack Hagood: And I assume all of this can happen over Zoom or whatever—

Jane von Mehren: Now, yes, yes, in the old—

Mack Hagood: —change.

Jane von Mehren: It is a big change. It used to be all in person or sometimes by phone. There would be phone conversations, but  nowadays it’s pretty much all Zoom.

Mack Hagood: Okay. So then—

Jane von Mehren: Then after those—

Mack Hagood: —meetings. Okay.

Jane von Mehren: And then I will set what’s called a closing date, and that’s a day that we’re going to accept offers and we’ll figure out depending on what has happened, how many people are interested, etc.

We’ll structure the closing in different ways it might be. Everybody give me your best bids by such and such a time on a particular day. Or it might be we’re going to take first bids and then we’ll take the top three bidders and move them along to the next round. It just depends. Nowadays most closings are best bids.

And that’s partly because the different companies have different rules about whether they can bid against other people within their corporation, right? So HarperCollins only gives you one bid, no matter how many people are interested. Random House has different divisions, and the different divisions can bid against each other, so long as there’s somebody outside of the corporation, outside of Random House.

So you could have two Random House divisions and Simon and Schuster, but you couldn’t have two divisions from Random House bidding against each other. So if you know you only have two Random House people, you’re only going to do best bids because you have to get them to just give you their bids.

Things like that. So it’s— it’s tricky. So structuring how you’re going to do it is partly based on who the players might be.

Mack Hagood: And since we’re talking about bidding, I, I know this is an extremely nebulous thing, but like, what kinds of money are we talking about? Because I think for a lot of academics, I certainly, for me, I had no idea. Like—

Jane von Mehren: Right. Right. So the money varies wildly. One of my colleagues, in fact, one of the founders of the agency I work at says the following, that most of the books that we sell, sell for between 75 and 500,000. And, you know, and what he says, and I see your book being in that, in that vein. And that, you know, and that is really true.

Most of the books we sell are in that range. There are some that are higher and there are some that are lower. And you often don’t know where you’re going to end up until it starts happening.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. And I’ve spoken to a couple of other agents and they said very similar things. They’re just like, there’s no telling, you know, if I could predict how much a book would sell for, I’d be making way more money.

Jane von Mehren: I mean, right. Exactly. And the reality is that people who do tell you how much they’re going to sell your book for probably don’t know. And to me, that can be a red flag, unless they’re saying, I see this book as being similar to a particular kind of book that I’ve sold and that sold for about like that kind of thing would be okay. 

But if they say, oh, I can get you three hundred thousand dollars for this book, I think that’s a red flag because they just don’t know, nobody knows. Yeah.

Mack Hagood: Well, I think for—

Jane von Mehren: If you’re really gonna count on the three hundred thousand dollars, I mean, I would just take it, you know, they don’t know, you shouldn’t take it for anything.

Mack Hagood: Right, right. Don’t go buying that Porsche.

Jane von Mehren: Right, exactly.

Mack Hagood: Get that midlife crisis car. Well, I mean, I think for those of us who have written academic books, this is like such a different scale that like the bottom end sounds pretty amazing.

Jane von Mehren: Right. Yep.

Mack Hagood: Okay. Well, wonderful. I thank you so much for, I think people will find that extremely helpful to just— I mean, this has been such a great walk through of the industry and how it all works. 

Just, this is just amazing. So maybe we can wrap up with a little bit of talking about the work itself.

And maybe some tips about writing a trade press book for people coming out of the academic world.

Jane von Mehren: Right.

Mack Hagood: What do you think is maybe the most important thing that academics need to know when they’re approaching writing non-fiction?

Jane von Mehren: Mm hmm. Well, I think the first thing that I would say is to remember that people like reading stories. And so if you can write about the subject that you’re writing about in a way that involves storytelling, whether it’s about your own life, and I think that is often why people do go to their own life, because it’s a way of bringing the subject into the real, into the world.

Or you can tell stories about other people. So, for example, in your proposal, you have that incredible opening down on Coney Island with, and I’m going to forget his name, but in the water trying to, yes, trying to record the sounds of the ocean. That’s such a stunner. You’ve never heard, I had never heard that story before, but even if I had, the way you read it, it’s so visual and you can just imagine being there that it’s very effective, it draws readers in.

So I think that’s one thing, is use narrative writing to make the subject approachable and draw people in. And I think the other thing is to remember that ideas are important and how can you write about your ideas and you’re thinking about them in a way that is approachable to somebody who knows nothing about them.

You want to assume that your reader is intelligent and is educated, but is not a PhD. And so what backgrounds do you need to give them? What sort of girding and context do they need to have in order to understand the subject of your book? And I think the other thing is, and we talked about this when we were talking about the proposal, is keep thinking about what is the ultimate reason that somebody is going to be reading this book and making sure that you’re not necessarily always saying you need, you know, this is important because, but that you’re writing the book so that you surface the stories, the thinking, the ideas that connect to ultimately why somebody is reading the book and why they’re— What is it that they’re hoping to get out of it?

The last thing that I would say is that you want to think of your book as a book that has a kind of narrative arc, that you’re going from a beginning to an end and what are the steps along the way that get you there so that as a reader is going through it, they feel that they’re, whether it’s learning about a period of time or a subject, that they’re learning the information in a way that makes sense, that helps to develop the bigger ideas that you have, and that makes for a reading experience that people want to keep reading. They want to keep going because everything that you are presenting is so interesting or so compelling or so necessary that they want to keep turning the pages.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. You know, what you’re saying there, it reminds me of, um, forgetting the exact title of this book, but Vivian Gornick it’s “The Situation and the Story.”

Jane von Mehren: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm

Mack Hagood: Is talking about writing memoir and, and there, there’s this sort of divide that she draws between the situation, which is the sort of who, what, where, when and how, you know, the, the sort of like the argument of a book, but then the story, which is the emotional experience.

It’s the thing that you’ve come to say to the reader. There’s some kind of paradox or question or, or there’s, there’s this momentum to it that makes the reader want to keep reading. I don’t know if that speaks to you at all.

Jane von Mehren: Yes, it does. Beautifully said. So it’s, I always love hearing the way that writers talk about these things, or people who have studied writing talk about them because they come at it in a different way, but absolutely.

Mack Hagood: One of the things we talked about at that workshop that I mentioned earlier was I don’t know where this comes from, to be honest, but it was something that we just kept talking about during the workshop, but it was the ladder of abstraction.

And, and basically the idea was that you have at the bottom, you have concrete details and, and, and just these sort of sensory elements, these, these very, you know, these pieces of narrative.

And then way up at the top of the ladder, you’ve got these really abstract concepts, right? The big ideas, the big

Jane von Mehren: Right.

Mack Hagood: And, there’s a sort of a middle of the ladder, which is I think academic writers tend to be, which is sort of like speaking in this kind of not completely abstract language, you know, it’s relating to the real world, but it’s, it’s using a lot of concepts that are kind of in that middle ground.

That’s not storytelling at the bottom and it’s not the big abstraction and but the suggestion in this workshop was you really want to go up and down the ladder and they’re like if you read a piece in the New Yorker, for example, you’ll notice that that’s what’s happening,

 right? Like, people will be in the details of storytelling with lots of sensory things and that make Make the story gripping, but then they’ll jump up to the top and the big abstract question of why do we care about this?

Jane von Mehren: Mm hmm.

Mack Hagood: And, and actually in, in podcasting in narrative podcasting, there’s a very similar thing. Ira Glass from This American Life talks about um, anecdotes and reflection points. And so the anecdotes are those details of story. And then every now and then, though, you need to pull back and say, why do we care about this little anecdote? Right? You need both. 

But you don’t want to be in the little ground where you’re not giving people this sort of. You know, sensory stimuli and narrative. And you’re also not giving them the big who cares thing. You’re kind of in the middle ground where you’re just assuming, well, we all believe that this is important and let me give you this really detailed information on it.

And that’s kind of not what people necessarily maybe want to be reading.

Jane von Mehren: Right. No, I think that’s absolutely right. That, and that’s a great way of thinking about it. And I think that the narrative that I talk about are those concrete details. And then the ideas are, you know, what am I trying to tell you? So, you do have to go back and forth.

And you know, it’s the, it’s a way in which a story, you know, a story or an image is worth So much it can create something in a reader’s mind and then once you’ve created that picture for them you can then draw back and say, okay, so the picture is important because I mean you don’t necessarily say it that way But that’s what you do It’s almost there are times when it feels as if what you’re doing as a writer is almost like being a filmmaker You’re doing it, you know getting close taking that sort of close up scene and then you’re pulling back so we can see the whole thing. And the two are really important. 

Mack Hagood: You know, like in my own work, cause I’ve, you know, the thing that I’m. That we’re working on, I’ve been studying this subject matter for over a decade now, and I did lots of interviews with people, but now that I’m trying to tell a story, you know, I’m realizing, well, a story has characters, right?

And, people can relate to characters. There are other people

Jane von Mehren: Right. Yeah.

Mack Hagood: But it made me realize that, like, I asked the wrong questions in my interviews a lot of the time, or not the wrong questions, but I asked a set of questions that was important for an academic project, and then I didn’t ask a whole other set of questions for, like, something that’s important for storytelling, which is, like–

Jane von Mehren: Mm hmm.

Mack Hagood: What did this person look like?

How did they dress? Did they have any weird quirks or, or like, you know, like those kinds of things that bring a character. To life and I think it’s really different to think about. Okay. I have an academic area of expertise. Where are the characters in that world? And what do I know about them? You know that that’s I’m sure that’s not the only way you could approach this kind of thing But that’s kind of how I’ve been approaching it.

And it’s it’s just making me have to think in a totally different way

Jane von Mehren: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that’s really smart. And I think also the other thing that’s really important is to realize that often there’s a lot in your head that you know or that you can see, that you assume. And if it’s not on the page, your reader doesn’t know any of that stuff, so you have to figure out what are the things that I know, you know, or that I can see, that need to be on the page in order for the reader to really get it.

That can be a tricky thing.

Mack Hagood: That’s such a good point. It is so hard to step out of this thing you’ve been in for a decade I mean, I think the good thing is that those of us who have undergraduate students and do have the opportunity to teach our area of expertise to undergrads at least get a sense of what? What they don’t get could be really helpful

Jane von Mehren: Right.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, Jane, like I, I just, this has been incredibly helpful. I really appreciate how generous you’ve been with your time and your expertise. So just thank you.

Jane von Mehren: Oh, you’re welcome. It’s been fun.

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