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 [email protected] 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 [email protected]. 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.

The post Publishing for Nonfiction Authors (Jane Von Mehren) appeared first on Phantom Power.

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Ever wonder who’s to blame for the noise and distraction of the open office? Our guest has answers.

Joseph L. Clarke is a historian of art and architecture and an associate professor at the University of Toronto. His 2021 book Echo’s Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space won a 2022 CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Title. It’s a fascinating history of how architects have conceived of and manipulated the relationship between sound and space. His most recent publication is “Too Much Information: Noise and Communication in an Open Office.” 

In this episode we’ll talk about media theorist Marshall McLuhan and his architecturally inspired theory of acoustic space, which went on to have its own influence in the field of architecture. We’ll also dive deep into the history of the open plan office, the theories of acoustic communication that inspired it, the sonic disaster it became, and the new media technologies that were invented in response. If you’ve ever been driven to distraction by noise in a cubicle farm or open office and wondered how such a space came to be, this episode’s got answers!

For our Patrons, we have another half hour of our interview, in which we cover the full history of architectural acoustics going back to the ancients and all the way up to the computer models of today. It’s really fascinating. You’ll also hear Joseph’s “What’s Good” segment, which is one of the best ever—some really unexpected selections for something good to read, listen to, and do. To join, go to Patreon.com/phantompower.

Mack Hagood: All right, Joseph. Welcome to the show.

Joseph L. Clarke: Thanks Mack.

Mack Hagood: So you were just just telling me before that you are in Paris right now, in like some kind of 17th century building. Is that correct?

Joseph L. Clarke: Oh yes. The building where I’m staying, it’s in the center of Paris. You know, all the buildings around me are kind of from the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. So it’s a somewhat primitive space, but a very charming one.

Mack Hagood: That sounds amazing. You really know how to do a research leave. What are you doing in Paris?

Joseph L. Clarke: You know, I’m following up on some of the research that I did for my book. My book came out a few years ago, but I’m still trying to trace down some, some of the loose threads. I’m also just really interested in the conversations and the discourse around sound and space in France in relation to the conversations that we have in North America.

I teach at the University of Toronto. This was, of course, the home of Marshall McLuhan, back in the fifties and sixties. Who came up with the idea of kind of popularizing the idea of acoustic space. Canada was also the home of people like R. Murray Schafer who you did a program on the podcast.

So there’s a lot of interesting discussions in Canada around sound and the spatial environment. But in France, there’s a very long standing tradition of  experimental music, sound art, the musique concrète  Pierre Shaeffer in the 1940s. Still today a lot of research and experimental music.

In the French academia, there’s this tradition of the history of sensibilities. And I’m thinking about a writer like Alain Corbin who’s written a number of books and essays, wonderful scholarship about the history of the sense of hearing and kind of its relationship to the city, to the landscape, to the physical environment in one form or another.

There are a lot of interesting conversations to be had between the kinds of research that are going on right now in France around sound and the physical environment and the way we think about these concepts in North America.

Mack Hagood: Oh yeah,  absolutely wanna dig into that intellectual history in North America of the idea of acoustic space. Because I just think that’s a really fascinating dimension of your work. But maybe before we do that, could you tell us a little bit about your background? You know, how did you get into this interest in the sonic dimension of architecture?

Joseph L. Clarke: Sure. So my background, , professionally is as an architect. I went to architecture school and then decided that I really was interested in the history of architecture and kind of found my way into where I currently am. I teach in a department of art history. But I think my interest in sound and space really goes back to when I was growing up.

I grew up in the Midwest, near Cincinnati. I sang in choirs, I sang in a choir at school, in a church choir. I was always interested in music and when I got to architecture school, I was actually really interested in how many of my classmates also had some kind of music in their background.

And it, it seemed to me like, I don’t know, there was some part of the brain that architects, architecture appeals to, music also appeals to some kind of combination of art and, and math. But at the same time, I realized as I went through architecture school, that the way that we are taught, we were taught to design buildings, was almost entirely visual.

And we were told to design through drawings, through images. And really didn’t get a lot of guidance in thinking about the sonic environment of spaces that we were designing and inhabiting. And we all know that actually sound is an incredibly important part of the architectural environment. But somehow it’s kind for architects, it’s a kind of a blind spot or maybe deaf spot.

We don’t really have a lot of tools within the kind of disciplinary framework that architects use to design the auditory environment of buildings in an intentional way.

Mack Hagood: You know a couple of things come to mind there. One, when I was just going through the Rolodex of architects I know, and I think all the ones I’m thinking of do play music. So that’s an interesting thing there. 

Joseph L. Clarke: Isn’t it weird? Yeah. 

Mack Hagood: But, I wanna return to something that you said earlier, and I want to maybe dive a little deeper into it. Which is the idea of acoustic space, thinking about sound spatially. This is something near and dear to my heart because of my own research and for me, I started thinking about sound spatially because of an experience I had when I lived in Taiwan many, many years ago.

In the early, mid-nineties I was sort of collecting these chanting Buddha machines. So the Pure Land Buddhists little like transistor radio looking things that would have certain kinds of mantras that would loop on these devices. And you could sort of generate karmic merit by playing these things, but also. It did something to the space you were inhabiting, right?

Like it made people feel peaceful at ease, so on and so forth. And so when I, you know, I just started these things because they were fascinating to me. I’d never seen anything like this. And then much, much later when I was in grad school I was reading Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and Lefebvre talks about space, not as just some kind of emptiness, but like a co-production of our mental ideas about space.

Our social enactment of space, so to speak, and the material dimensions of space. And that those three things together create the spaces we inhabit. And, and that to spaces, not just material, it’s also representational.

And it’s social. And when I read that, it brought me back to those Buddha machines that I collected, right? I was thinking, oh yes, those technologies are using sound in a way that’s social, but it’s also spatial. It’s creating a certain kind of space that a person can inhabit. And that’s really what set me off on all my research into white noise and noise canceling headphones and so forth, was thinking about how we could construct a particular lived space through sound. And then it was only through that interest that I learned about things like R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape and other people who were thinking about sound spatially. And I started reading that literature. Not that there was a ton of it, but there was some stuff.

What I love about your book is, the full title is Echo’s Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space and, it’s giving us this cultural history of the idea of acoustic space. And actually this idea, at least in that terminology “acoustic space” is very recent vintage, right? Like, this is Marshall McLuhan. And it is also architecture’s influence on Marshall McLuhan. So I’m wondering if maybe you can talk about how McLuhan put this on the map and how it influenced people like R. Murray Schafer, who is gonna be familiar to our listeners.

Joseph L. Clarke: Sure. What a great question. And I mean, that’s so fascinating about the Buddha and your Taiwan story. I just wanted to pick up also on when you brought up Lefebvre’s The Production of Space which is great.

And I just wanted to add that architecture is such an important part of that and Lefebvre talks about the role of architecture in producing space. So, I think it’s so important to think of space not just as a kind of neutral container that’s already there that we just fill with stuff.

But, the space as it’s lived in and as we understand it and occupy it socially is actually produced by us. And by, as you say, by the kind of material world including architecture and the role of architecture in articulating space. And thereby, we might say creating space as a phenomenal reality is one that has been much discussed by architects for many, many years. There was a German architectural theorist named, um, August Schmarsow at the end of the 19th century who made this argument that the ultimate function, the kind of highest function of architecture, was the creation of space.

And this was a really important idea for the early 20th century modernists at the Baaus for architects like Le Corbusier. The idea of actually using architecture to produce a kind of space was absolutely central, which is why I leave out the sonic dimension and we think about architecture purely in terms of a visual construction.

Then we end up with a really impoverished idea of space that is limited to only one of our senses and leaves out the incredibly rich and clearly very important dimension of sound.

Now, your question was about McLuhan. Yes, it’s, so, it’s really interesting. It was McLuhan who taught at the University of Toronto where I teach now. I actually had a number of colleagues involved with architecture and architectural history. One of his colleagues at the university was named Jaqueline Tywhritt who was actually an urban planner and was connected with a group called the CIAM, or the C.I.A.M.

It’s the Congres International D’architecture Moderne, which was kind of a group of networks for architects from all over the world who were broadly aligned with the modernist movement, with the international style of architecture and urban design and would share their ideas. And so this woman Tywhritt was the conduit for McLuhan to really be influenced by all of these ideas of modern architects.

And particularly the, the most important influence on him was an architectural historian named Siegfried Gideon. So he was a Swiss historian who wrote one of the earliest histories of architectural modernism, really as it was happening in the 1920s as European architects were beginning to design these radical new kinds of buildings.

Gideon was writing a book sort of in real time, chronicling these developments. And again, really theorizing this idea of architecture as the construction of space. And so McLuhan discovered Gideon’s writing and was deeply influenced by it, deeply moved by it. He wrote later on in his life about how radical he found Gideon’s historical writing.

He invited Gideon to come. He came to Toronto and participated in McLuhan’s seminar on culture and communication. And this was the context where the phrase “acoustic space” was born. I mean McLuhan wasn’t actually the first person to use this term. You can find earlier examples back in the 19th century of people using the words, acoustic space.

But really it was McLuhan who seized on this expression and said, “Yes, this is the key to putting together all of my ideas about media and sound and literature and space, this kind of physical environment.” And so he took up this “phrase acoustic” space and began to repeat it over and over again in his writings in the late fifties and in the 1960s.

It comes up over and over again.

Mack Hagood: What did he mean by it?

Joseph L. Clarke: He never really defines it, or at least he never sticks to a single consistent definition of it. So, McLuhan as anybody who’s read, Marshall McLuhan knows I mean, he’s, he’s an absolutely inspiring writer. It’s a lot of fun to read his writing. But when you actually try to pin down what he is really saying?

What is actually the argument? So you can test it and see whether or not it makes sense. He’s actually very slippery and he’s much better, I think, for kind of sparking an idea. It’s an incredibly rich and creative way of writing that is not really easy to pin down to a specific definition.

Mack Hagood: You can see how an idea like acoustic space is generative of ideas like “media as the extension man,” one of his, one of his concepts, right? Like the idea, we are bodies in space and that our communications media are ways of extending the body. Our technologies are ways of extending the body.

Then of course he has this problematic way of historicizing our means of communication and extending our bodies based on these different eras that allegedly happened that you referred to earlier. I mean, one of the critiques that you and others have made is that, even though this is a provocative idea, and like you it could be very good to think with, it also prevents us from thinking about the interplay of senses in a given era, right?

Joseph L. Clarke: And that interplay is often the most interesting thing. Yeah, I mean, McLuhan is both a wonderful writer and, and also a frustrating one at times. I mean, sometimes I read McLuhan and I think, “Well, he’s almost exactly right. But not quite.” Actually, for me, his historical framework is useful.

It’s useful that he made that argument because at the time he made it, nobody had put forward anything like that before. And it was incredibly perceptive in picking up on some of these historical changes. But that argument having been made and set out, then we can come along and see that in fact it needs a considerable amount of refinement, let’s say, in order to account for all of the  actually more interesting overlaps and ambiguities and the ways that these things come into a more interesting kind of dialogue.

And in some ways I think McLuhan himself was really interested in those kinds of ambiguities as well. And the very phrase, acoustic space. One reason why McLuhan’s phrase acoustic space is interesting to me is because it combines. Two words, which might have been thought to, to not have so much to do with one another.

There’s an older intellectual tradition, which I guess we could trace back to Hagel or even considerably earlier, that music is an art of time and visual arts, in which architecture is grouped, has to do with space. And so when we talk about sound, we should really be focusing on the temporal dimension as opposed to the spatial. 

So the phrase acoustic space is immediately interesting because it refutes this whole presupposition and suggests that in fact, sound does occupy space and can articulate and, even in a way, construct a certain kind of space.

And clearly that was part of the appeal for McLuhan. So in a way I think although we can point to some of the limitations of McLuhan’s historical categories, I’m sure he too would be the first to acknowledge that way of thinking can be too limiting.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, and it’s so in keeping with his idea that the medium is the message that the media technologies that were available at that time. I think it just makes the notion of acoustic space more available to the mind, right? Like my story about Taiwan. I kind of came to this sensibility about acoustic space. Through my exposure to the Walkman and to this Buddha machine creating this certain kind of spatial…I heard its sound, and I started wandering through some alleys to try to track down where this sound was coming from, right? Like, it was a very spatial experience and there’s about the way we inhabit, a world of mediated sound. That makes the idea of the sensibility of acoustic space just readily available to us in ways that perhaps it really wasn’t in earlier eras.

Joseph L. Clarke: Yes. Or in different ways. It may have been available in different ways in other eras as you’re describing this vignette from Taiwan. So I’m sitting here in Paris, and it was exactly 6 p.m. and so as you were speaking, you probably couldn’t hear it on the recording, but a church bell just down the street started ringing.

And, anybody who’s spent time in one of these old European cities knows that when, when the church bells start going they can actually be incredibly loud when you’re up close to them, and then the way the sound of the bells reverberates down a narrow street of stone buildings can be extremely intense and a very spatial experience of sound.

And then, another church bell, a few blocks away, also starts going and you can almost hear the distance between the two structures. So yes, the idea that acoustic space is in some ways a product of our media environment is absolutely true and we have to remember that people who lived, you know, 300 years ago or however many years ago had their own kind of media environment that had its own acoustic properties that may be somewhat foreign to us today.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Fair enough. Absolutely. Now that we’ve discussed McLuhan and his concept of acoustic space, maybe we can segue into talking about open plan offices because it turns out McLuhan is sort of a player in that narrative as well. You recently wrote this article “Too Much Information: Noise and Communication in an Open Office.” And I was thrilled to read this because when we first met, I was telling you, we met in Toronto at a writer’s workshop. And I was telling you about the book project I’m working on and one of the chapters, it’s probably the least researched chapter that I want to do is think about the role of offices, especially open plan offices in people’s adoption of things like white noise machines and noise canceling headphones because, you know, quite often when we’re thinking about what kinds of pressures cause people to use these technologies, you know, and I ask people one of the big villains is the acoustic disaster zone of an open plan office. And yet as you point out the people who originally designed this kind of space were thinking about acoustic communication.

It’s not like they didn’t think about sound. They thought a lot about sound. So maybe you can sort of walk us through the early history of the open plan office. What were people trying to accomplish? You know, where does this concept come from?

Joseph L. Clarke: Open plan offices started to become really popular in the 20th century especially around the mid 20th century for, fundamentally because of money, because it was cheaper to build one big open space and put a bunch of office workers in it. All sharing the same environment, rather than building a bunch of separate offices separated by walls and with a kind of corridor connecting them.

This became possible with the advance of steel and reinforced concrete construction, so you could have big wide open spaces in buildings. Fluorescent lighting, air, modern air conditioning technology, all made it more possible and more appealing to construct these kinds of vast open spaces.

But beyond the simple, budgetary rationale that it was cheaper. There was also an argument that people could work better especially in the kinds of knowledge professions where people needed to communicate with one another as part of their jobs. It was better to do it in a big open space because it allowed for the kind of free flow of ideas.

Co-workers could just talk to each other directly, rather than always having to walk down the hall and see if somebody else knocked on the door and see if they were in their office. So for a lot of businesses And this sort of goes along with the rise of the knowledge economy that we kind of often talk about in the post-World War II period.

A lot of corporations started turning to these big open plans, thinking that it would improve the way that people work. And of course, as you can imagine, sound and the acoustic environment is entangled in this idea in so many ways.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. And, one of the points that you make that I really enjoyed was, seeing this transition from pre World War II thinking about the office as a machine to after World War II starting to think of the office as a computer. And that the circulation of information verbally between people. 

In this knowledge work, you know, the milieu becomes sort of like the definition of what is being done in an office like that. That source starts to be the conception of what we’re actually doing. When we’re in an office we are circulating information. And so it would make sense to sort of reduce those physical barriers to our verbal communication with one another because we’re all really just nodes in a network of information. Right? We’re just one big brain and you wouldn’t want to divide your brain with a bunch of walls, right?

You want the brain to be whole.

Joseph L. Clarke: Exactly. We’re one giant brain. And this idea really reflects the rise of cybernetics in the postwar period. This incredibly fashionable, interdisciplinary way of thinking about communication and control systems in anything from an actual digital computer to a whole society and kind of how it works.

But a very influential field in The study of management and business in the post war period and so very influential on the design of offices.

Mack Hagood: And can you tell us a little bit about the German roots of the open plan? Because, this was something that I wasn’t really aware of until I started reading your work.

Joseph L. Clarke: Yeah, I’m actually, I see the history of open plan offices as a kind of essentially, American and German designers and executives. So some really crucial steps happened in Germany. Of course if we think about the history of modern architecture in Germany, the Bauhaus architects like Walter Gropius were incredibly important in promoting taking industrial means of making buildings and developing a kind of aesthetic style for them and really, developing design methods and selling these to the public.

To make big, modern steel and glass and concrete buildings, um, stylish and, to give them a kind of aesthetic sensibility.

So the open plan was an incredibly important part of that the building of the Bauhaus, which was designed by the architect Walter Gropius in the 1920s had a big, essentially open plan workshop studio space so if you think about hundreds of design students in the 1920s went to school and learned how design ina giant open plan space, so it was an incredible tool for the kind of propagation of this idea of modern architecture.

So in the post World War II period the Germans, especially in West Germany, were really interested in open plan office design. And, of course, West Germany at this period had a very direct dialogue with the United States. There was a lot of Marshall Plan money flowing into West Germany to kind of support the economic rebuilding.

And so a lot of German companies were adopting models of American business. and also a lot of German ideas were finding their way into North America as well. So I’m interested in this kind of dialogue between the two countries and, and how it shaped the design of workplaces.

Mack Hagood: You, talked about the, um, I don’t remember how it’s said in German, but it was the idea of the landscape offfice–

Joseph L. Clarke: Yeah, yes, it’s a, yes, it’s one of these wonderful German words that’s just, taking a bunch of words and putting them together. It’s Um, so this is what a term that a couple of offices, actually, they were kind of office consultants, came up with around 1960. They were, two brothers named, Eberhard and Wolfgang Schneller, and they, companies would hire them not just to, redesign their physical environment, that was part of it, but really to rethink the whole way that the, that the office would be organized, rethink the work processes, and so they became incredibly influential consultants.

And they invented a kind of model of the office that they called the Bürolandschaft, or landscape office. Which would be a huge, completely open interior space, and these were, much larger, building floor plates than had been customary in office buildings up until this time. So, again, it’s really these new technologies like fluorescent lighting and air conditioning that make this possible.

Um, but it was very important for them that the space be completely open so that co-workers could have this direct exchange with one another. And it was a, you know, a somewhat utopian idea that more communication is always better. And for, for those of us who actually have experience, working in open offices, you might think you know, you’re banging  your head against the wall when you hear that because because we all can think of the, the aggravations and annoyances that come from, having too much communication with our coworkers.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, and that is so fascinating to me because as someone who has worked in an open office and had that kind of frustration and just felt like, Oh, this is just a cheaper way, you know, to toss us all into one big room and they don’t care what our experiences are. It was fascinating for me to learn about how these Schneller brothers were really thinking that this kind of cybernetic approach to the office would actually flatten the hierarchies of the office, and that it was actually this kind of liberatory idea that you would have this, you know, agile workforce where workers had more autonomy and could collaborate and work in teams and all of this very familiar type stuff today that it was a really kind of a democratic way of thinking about the office, um, which is so different from the lived experience of being a worker drone in an open plan office.

It’s just kind of fascinating to me.

Joseph L. Clarke: Yeah, in studying this history, I mean, I just go back and forth between seeing their ideas as incredibly altruistic and incredibly dystopian. And somehow these two things coexist at the exact same time but at the time, in the 1960s, this was seen as an incredibly progressive and democratic way of making offices in some of these new corporate headquarters that they designed, even the early 1970s.

Executives, even the CEOs, wouldn’t necessarily spend all their time in a private office, but sometimes would actually be out there in the open space along with their employees. So it was meant to kind of reduce some of the hierarchies and, and to reduce some of the gender hierarchies as well.

So people would have thought of, you know, the women are the secretaries or the typists and they’re kind of in the open spaces and then the men have to have private offices, and so breaking down some of these hierarchies, was seen as an incredibly progressive development, but it also brought its share of acoustic frustrations because now you could hear everything going on around you.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. And, this was really interesting to me because it’s, you know, one of those sad cases of unintended consequences, and this model of communication that, you know, cybernetics, has things like Claude Shannon’s, 1948 essay, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” right? Where you’re trying to maximize the signal and minimize the noise to enhance communication, theories like this could sort of have unintended consequences when it came to architectural acoustics because people were sort of trying to apply that kind of theory and the way that they tended to do it was to think about echoes and reflections of sound, things that muddied the sound as being the noise that you wanted to reduce so that you can get a nice clear signal.

And this is what we do with recording studios and audiophile listening rooms as we deaden the space so that we can hear the signal more clearly, but in an open plan office, that can actually be counterproductive. Can you maybe talk a little bit about that?

Joseph L. Clarke: Sure. We all know how distracting it can be when you’re trying to read, or write, or concentrate to hear the sound. For example, let’s say you have a co-worker who’s talking on the phone, and you’re hearing one, so you’re hearing one side of the phone conversation, and, I mean, it can, it can be the most annoying thing in the world, right?

So there was a great effort. There was a real push around the mid 20th century to make offices quieter and eliminate noise. And this is how it was conceptualized. And architects had a kind of repertoire of techniques, for doing that because a lot of their experiences with acoustics were in buildings like concert halls and theaters and spaces where you actually did want to eliminate extraneous noises so that the only thing you could hear was the, performance that you were there to listen to.

The problem is that they found that in offices, the quieter they made them. The more people complained about noise and that it seemed counterintuitive. But actually if anybody who’s like me who sometimes likes to work in Starbucks or work in a coffee shop or a place where there’s a little bit of background kind of hum of people coming and going and talking, we’ll recognize that this kind of background noise can sometimes actually be very conducive to work among other things because it has a masking effect.

So, the problem of distracting sound is not actually noise per se. If you define noise as an unintelligible sound. That unintelligible sound could be good, because the problem is the intelligible sound. The problem is when you can hear noises that you recognize, and this is the thing that really interferes with your concentration.

So there seems to have been a kind of paradigm shift around the 1960s in thinking about noise and moving away from that earlier paradigm of noise reduction and just wanting to, to quiet everything, and instead actually embracing noise at least in limited amounts, um, in always in carefully controlled ways but for its masking abilities.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. And this, as you say, in this 1960s period, it’s interesting because we go from lionizing the transmission of information in this kind of cybernetic model to starting to worry about something called information overload, right?

Where people start to worry, “Wait, wait a minute, maybe there’s too much communication.” Maybe there’s too much information and it’s interesting that information overloads you. mention used to be kind of something that scientists worried about, like keeping up with the literature, which I think any of us can relate to as scholars, right? That form of information overload, but it kind of came into common parlance as just a way to think about this, this, bombardment of media.

And McLuhan seemed to have an idea. And again, this is something I was not familiar with until I read your work that maybe architecture could Be a means of helping us I don’t know mold is in such a way that we could handle the amount of information that that we’re downloading at any given moment

Joseph L. Clarke: Yeah no, it’s really interesting How McLuhan fits in with the kind of anxiety about information overload and McLuhan also writes about kind of the new, all of the new media technologies and, challenging kind of our sensory balance and getting our senses out of balance in some way and so his argument was that humans needed to find ways of adapting to this new media environment these new kinds of communication and architecture was one among many means of facilitating that adaptation.

So he actually wrote a number of articles for architectural journals and magazines. He wrote an article in the magazine Canadian Architect arguing that architects needed to be very aware of all of these changes in communication technology and media and to be really keyed into them because the special vocation of architecture, he thought was to help architecture and really all of the arts was to train people’s sensoria to be able to deal with the new media reality that we’re living in.

And I think information overload was very much part of that. And, certainly a way of thinking through that experience of being in a big open plan office where you can hear. Fragments of people’s conversations and phone calls and all kinds of sounds of business going on around you.

And you have to find a way, psychologically, of somehow dealing with that and insulating yourself from that. And this idea of sonic masking became really important and really comes to the foreground in this period and actually, your own work, Mack on the history of white noise and the rise of white noise.

The kind of personal use of white noise machines is also contemporaneous with this, and I think very much in dialogue with it. And as someone who uses a Marpac to sleep, and I can’t sleep without some kind of white noise I completely identify with this technology and with the necessity of having some kind of masking to be able to just deal with this overload of sound.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, I mean my book Hush I talk about how the invention of the sort of sound conditioner as they called it at Marpac was invented basically for domestic use and for helping people sleep. But they found that so many people were bringing these into the office that people were dissatisfied with the branding.

There was a little badge on the top of the machine that said sleepmate. And people didn’t feel like that was professional enough. So they created a second brand. It was the absolutely identical technology, but they called it the sound screen so that you wouldn’t have to be embarrassed about having a sleepmate in your office.

And so, these became, you know, part of what we might say the tactics of people who inhabited the open plan office to mitigate the noise problem, but. What your work speaks to and, you know, what I’m so excited about learning more on is there were also these more centralized approaches to using noise to mitigate the noise problem.

And so this is where we get into Herman Miller and the Action Office. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

Joseph L. Clarke: Absolutely. Herman Miller, the furniture company, is incredibly important in this story. Herman Miller, created the line of office furniture that they call the action office that is often seen as the forerunner of the modern cubicle, essentially up until that point, Herman Miller was primarily a residential furniture company, and they kind of found their way into , selling office furniture as well.

And then this action office concept really took off and seemed to just catch the, the kind of zeitgeist just as American businessmen were starting to discover the Bürolandschaft, that German kind of experimental open office idea. Herman Miller comes along and offers a set of a whole line of furniture, so desks, shelving units, partitions that are perfectly designed to furnish a large open office space like this.

And it was this kind of off the shelf product. You could buy it and configure your own, um, landscape style office. So. These products and these office designs really took off in the U.S. And, of course, this exactly coincided with the anxiety around information overload. And so very quickly, Herman Miller.

And, one of their chief designers, Robert Probst who was an inventor who worked at Herman Miller and was kind of trying to think through a lot of these problems they realized that they had to do something about acoustics. And so they actually, Herman Miller did release its own white noise generator it was called the Action Office Acoustic Conditioner.

And so it was this little object that could be adjusted and tuned, um, you could, you could change the frequency of the sound and adjust some other, , , sound qualities to be able to mask sound, of any particular type that you might encounter throughout the office. So, for example, if you needed to mask the sound of somebody on a typewriter, you could set the frequency for that.

If it was more, the problem was more people talking. You could adjust it. And as time went on, and as they continued to sell their action office line, more and more , the advice that they were giving companies for how to configure their offices was designed around , or was organized around mitigating these kind of acoustic problems, and so they would even encourage companies to, , lay out The workers in the office based on the sound levels that they would produce.

And so, for example, where in an earlier open office, you would cluster all of the typists into one typing pool, and then you would have the people who needed more , a quieter environment, you would sort of segregate them. Now, the advice was actually the opposite, that instead, you should distribute the typists evenly throughout the office, so that their typing would just create a kind of low level background noise that would mask other kinds of noise and then would allow people to concentrate.

So it’s interesting the way you can actually trace this history of thinking about sound and noise and acoustics in the evolving office layouts over the decades.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, that’s just fascinating that we’re still using the same kind of space, but it becomes all about how we use noise to limit the amount of information that can travel through this space, it’s in the principles of masking.

One question that I have is this idea of the electro… First of all, do you know what the Herman Miller device is? Was it also electromechanical or was it electronic? Was it playing, um, a recording or did it have a fan on the inside? Like, like the, um, the Marpac device.

Joseph L. Clarke: I don’t know. I don’t know.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, that’s one thing that I want to dig into.

And, also I’m really interested in sort of tracing the patents around that machine, because I feel like. Even though there was, there were experiments going on with somebody like Leo Beranek, at MIT, on the principles of masking since World War II I still kind of feel like Marpac got there first in terms of a product. And I’m a little surprised how that got such a big uptake in the office world and Marpac never profited from that. And so I just don’t know if they missed an opportunity for a lawsuit or if–

Joseph L. Clarke: It sure sounds like it, doesn’t it? Yeah.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, I don’t know.

Joseph L. Clarke: Um, that’s a great question, and I think that, yeah, it would be really fascinating to dig in and research that. I just wanted to mention a funny story while we’re on the subject. So one reason why these Acoustic masking concerns really, really started to become intense in the 1970s in open offices is actually because of the improvement of air conditioning and, and ventilation technology.

So, HVAC, as we call it in architecture–heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems–were becoming quieter and where before you would be sitting and you would always hear this kind of hum of the fan running, blowing air, they became much quieter. And this was another case of it being marketed as an improvement.

Oh, it’s much quieter. But for people working in offices, it actually made things worse because suddenly now you instead of that, that nice, just steady home, you could hear. Everything is going on around you. And so this was one of the catalysts actually for introducing white noise, artificial white noise systems, in offices to replace that lost air conditioning sound.

But for many office workers, they still had the association in their mind, they thought this sound was coming from the air conditioner. And so there’s one story of an office where The white noise generator broke down, and suddenly, people were having trouble working and they all complained that they were suddenly feeling hot because the air conditioner stopped working, which was totally not true.

The air conditioner was fine but they subjectively felt like something was wrong , because they couldn’t hear the noise anymore. So eventually, the company had to let everybody go home for the day , because everybody was complaining about the heat.

Mack Hagood: Oh, yeah, that’s, that’s really hilarious. It speaks to that, you know, Marpac got the, the, the term that they use, the sound conditioner from air conditioning, you know, like that they, they were very familiar with that sort of. sound of the air conditioner. And in fact, the story goes that they came up with the idea for the sound conditioner when the owners, the couple named the Buckwalters, were at a roadside motel and the air conditioner broke down and suddenly they could hear the noise.

Coming from the room next door and that they were kept awake all night because the air conditioner broke So that’s where they got the concept.

Joseph L. Clarke: Such a great story. I love that.

Mack Hagood: So today We are in a new era in which people communicate through computers. We’re no longer just emulating a computer Arranging an office to be a giant brain. We’re all , you know synapses on the web, so to speak. And so how has that affected the contemporary office? You know, obviously we’re in a post COVID moment where people are wondering if office space is still even necessary.

When it comes to architectural acoustics and noise and the, in the office what’s the story today?

Joseph L. Clarke: You know it’s a good question, and I can’t, provide a very satisfying answer, because I’m a historian, so I deal with the past and not the future, and not really even the present, but I can say that computers started or desktop computers really started to proliferate in offices in the 1980s.

And they really did have a profound effect on the way offices were designed. So we, this is sort of when the Bürolandschaft landscape office idea really begins to decline. And, in fact, there are examples of these. Former open office is being converted in the 80s into more compartmentalized offices or sometimes into just, the kind of grids of cubicles that, we’re all familiar with, the sort of dystopian cubicle farm, so it seems to me that with the introduction of networked desktop computers, this earlier metaphor, like you were saying, of the, the office as a giant brain, in a way doesn’t make sense anymore. Because now the communication nodes are computers, rather than ourselves physically present together in a giant open workspace.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that open offices have gone away, and at least, or at least, up until the onset of the pandemic, were still, quite popular but some of that utopian idea that an open office will improve communication, will make it possible for us, for the kind of ideas and knowledge to flow freely between coworkers seems to have lost some of its persuasive power as far as the future and of offices after the pandemic.

You know, it’s really hard to say. Of course, it’s true that computer platforms like Zoom or Teams or some of these other systems are really trying to give physical offices a run for their money. And, the dream is that online platforms would be able to just completely replace physical spaces where co workers would gather together and work together.

As for me, as somebody trained in architecture I hope that doesn’t happen. I would still make the argument in favor of the office, although the history of office design certainly has its share of dystopian examples. I guess part of me at heart, I still believe in the value of having physical environments where people come together and, and interact in person and, collaborate, on projects, together.

And, I think, of course, the sonic dimension of that is incredibly important to be with other people in a shared acoustic environment. So, but I do think it will be a challenge for, office designers as well as for, for companies to make that case, for what kind of value a physical shared office brings in a world where as you say, we, we can communicate perfectly well or, or reasonably well through a, a digital network.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, it’s a very interesting tension at play right now. I mean, on the one hand, we have a lot of people post pandemic who are like, why should I come into the office at all? On the other hand, we’ve also seen the rise of co-working spaces where people who are digital nomads, so to speak. are feeling like they lack a sense of community and want a space where they can still be at least in proximity to others.

So it’s a very strange time for the office. Well, thank you so much for talking to me about all this. I’ve really been, over the past year, getting to know you and your work has been just a professional highlight for me because I think we have a lot of interests in common and I really appreciate the rigor that you’ve brought to your research on this interplay between sound and architecture.

Joseph L. Clarke: Well, the feeling is really mutual, Mack. Your work has been incredibly important and inspiring for me and, and I’ve really enjoyed the chance to talk to you today.

Mack Hagood: All right. Well, thank you so much.

The post Noise and Information in the Office (Joseph L. Clarke) appeared first on Phantom Power.

Today we bring you a masterclass in audiobook narration and acting with acclaimed actor, casting director, audiobook narrator and audiobook director, Robin Miles. Miles has narrated over 500 audiobooks, collecting numerous industry awards and, in 2017, was added to the Audible Narrator Hall of Fame. She’s the most recognizable voice in literary Afrofuturism, having interpreted books by Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemisin, and Nnedi Okorafor. Miles holds a BA and an MFA from Yale. She has taught young actors and narrators at conservatories across the country and she has an amazing talent for doing accents—something we really dig deep into on this podcast. In this conversation we talk about technique, the audiobook industry, and the politics of vocal representation. How do we avoid the misrepresentation of marginalized people on the one hand and vocal typecasting on the other?

For our Patrons we have almost an hour of additional content, including our What’s Good segment where Robin unsurprisingly makes some really great book recommendations! If you want hear all the bonus content, just go to patreon.com/phantompower. Membership starts at just three dollars a month and helps pay the expenses of producing the show.

 [Robotic music] This is phantom power. 

[Brass band playing]

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of phantom power. I’m Mack Hagood. Today we’re bringing you a masterclass in audiobook narration and acting with acclaimed audiobook narrator, Robin Miles. But first, if you’re wondering about the brass band music in the background, I just got back from Carnival  in my hometown, New Orleans, Louisiana. 

And man, my heart is full, but my body is a bit depleted. As I said the other day on Facebook, the Fatter the Tuesday, the Ashier the Wednesday.  I got into New Orleans on Friday, ate some good food with the family. Saturday, it was all parades Uptown. My wife Bridget was marching in a parade. My boys Abe and Theo were taking it all in with me, catching all the throws.

Sunday was Abe’s 17th birthday. We celebrated with family and friends. And then the next day was Lundi Gras and we did a second line down Bourbon Street through the French Quarter with my wife’s marching crew, the Dames de Perlage. The Dames learned beadwork from the famed Mardi Gras Indians, and they work on these amazing beaded costumes all year long. In fact, Bridget listens to a lot of audio books–especially those narrated by Robin Miles–while she works on her beadwork every night. And so it was amazing to just see the fellowship of these women out in the street. Dancing to the sounds of the Big Fun brass band that y’all just heard just now. What a beautiful day.

And then and then on Fat Tuesday I hung out in the Marigny area. There were a lot of great DJs with small mobile sound systems on different corners. And we were just dancing in the streets all day.  And then it was Ash Wednesday. The next day, after all the day-long drinking and fried food and King cake, I ate vegan all day. How’s that for repentance? And I went and bought some Louisiana music and history books at Blue Cypress Books uptown. And I even went to church. Although I didn’t get any ashes because I haven’t been to confession in about 40 years.  Like I said, my body’s depleted, but man, my soul is full. It was just so beautiful. So real. The only time I touched my phone was to, you know, take a picture or meet up with somebody. And man, do it. If you haven’t been there, go.

Okay, let’s talk about today’s guest. I am so excited. Robin Miles is an American actor, casting director, audio book narrator, and audiobook director. She has narrated over 500  audio books. She’s won every award you can think of in this space. In 2017, she was added to the Audible narrator hall of fame.

She holds a BA and an MFA from Yale. She’s taught young actors and narrators at conservatories across the country, and she has an amazing talent for doing accents, which is something we really dig deep into in this podcast. It was a dream interview for me because Robin is my favorite audiobook narrator, and I really enjoyed getting into the weeds of her work.

We talk about  how she creates a parasocial relationship with her listener. We really dive into scene analysis and acting and also in narration, like how does she mark up a script or mark up a book to make decisions about characterization and vocalization?  We talk about the International Phonetic Alphabet. And how that’s such a crucial tool for her accent work. We dig into some of her work narrating Afrofuturist fiction. So, we talk about her work doing N.K. Jemisin’s books and Nalo Hopkinson’s books, and then we really get into a fascinating talk about the politics of representation in voice.

Who should be able to represent whom vocally? What are the ethics around that? And she has, as you might not be surprised to learn as a woman of color who’s been narrating audio books forever and acting forever. She has a lot of really  profound ideas about this topic. So I just learned so much from her. 

We talked for two hours. There was way more content than I could put in one episode. So for our patrons, I have almost an hour of additional content. We talked about unionization, how she approaches nonfiction as a narrator. What kind of microphone does she use? We talk about Octavia E. Butler, like just, there’s so much more, including our What’s Good segment where unsurprisingly, Robin makes some really great book recommendations. I mean, she has read a few books! So, if you want to hear all of that bonus content, just go to patreon.com/phantompower. Membership starts at just three bucks a month and you’re helping me pay for the expenses of making this show. 

All right, without further ado, here she is, Robin Miles:

Mack Hagood: Robin Miles, thank you so much for being on the show.

Robin Miles: It is my pleasure. Thanks for reaching out to me.

Mack Hagood: I have to say it’s a little bit uncanny for me to hear you speaking directly to me through my headphones because you’ve been a voice in my headphones for so many years and there’s this term in media studies, that I think is actually gotten wide exposure now, but a parasocial relationship.

Like, I feel like I have this relationship with you because you’re my favorite audiobook narrator. Do you think about that kind of relationship often? Does that affect how you do your job at all?

Robin Miles: You know what? I would have to say that it’s the cornerstone of my relationship to what I do and my audience because I actually taught this lesson yesterday, when I was in the classroom to my audiobook class. The very first thing that you have to do as a narrator is establish a relationship with your listener. And they’re not physically, corporeally there, so you have to project it. And I always tell my students, you’re not talking to a group of people. This is not an address, a public address. Your listener is one person. And, so as they’re practicing and getting used to talking to one person, I say, “You can use the person sitting next to you.”

If you’re in a booth, you can use an engineer, if you’re lucky enough to have one, on the other side. Or if you’ve got really good acting chops, you can project that person across from you. But the scenario in my head is, I’m telling this story to you, across the top of a table in an Irish pub, and it has to be an Irish pub.

Mack Hagood: Oh, really?

Robin Miles: Because it’s the most collegial place in the world.

Culturally, it’s just like an after work place to let down your hair, to reconnect with the community after you’ve done your job all day, and there are people all around you doing the same with another person. And so, you have to create a bubble of intimacy around you in that table.

The way you would in a bar when there are other conversations going on. You want to be heard by that person, so you can’t be all whispery. But at the same time, you don’t want everybody in the bar to know your business.

I have a friend who is my bestie from fifth grade. She’s brilliant. Her name is Beth Mannion. She’s a published writer and also writes under a pseudonym. And, I was hosting a talk with her and another author that both specialize in Irish studies. And she got her degree in Ireland at the Beckett Center.

But to be the host of her talk, I felt it was necessary to read her book. So, I knew what it was about. It’s just my friend. I’m really happy to do it, but I learned a lot actually. She talked about pubs and the cultural significance of them in Ireland before we even had pubs here.

And so, that same, quintessential feeling of sitting down with someone you know after work and sharing life. In Hawaii, they might call it “talking story” just telling your story. So that’s where it starts for me. And if you don’t have that intimacy and that connection to that audience, which is an audience of one, you miss something.

Mack Hagood: It’s a different form of address. It’s a more intimate form of address when you’re addressing one person rather than an imagined group.

Robin Miles: Yes, and even when I’m teaching just straight acting in the classroom, if I have an actor doing one exercise I have them do is from St. Joan of the Stockyards and she’s standing there talking to a group of people trying to motivate them to like, you know, march and protest. Even though it’s a group of people and one person addressing them, I have them always make eye contact with one person, then move to another, then move to another, so it’s always a one on one, it’s just there are many ones.

Mack Hagood: And for our listeners, so you are not only an audiobook narrator and an actor, but you also teach acting. Can you tell us just a little bit about that since you mentioned it?

Robin Miles: Sure, right now I’m a professor at Pace University, which is in New York. I’ve also taught at UCSD and SUNY Purchase and, you know, those are really good conservatories. I count myself extremely lucky to have been part of the faculty of all of them. But right now I teach my freshman script analysis, which is helping them learn to see the invisible connections.

I say this all the time. That theater and entertainment, what we do as actors and play makers, people who make entertainment, is that we make the invisible visible. Make the invisible forces between human beings that you can’t see or touch or smell, but you can absolutely emotionally feel them.

They’re invisible. And we basically examine them and then inhabit them so that they can be seen. That’s what we do. And so script analysis is seeing where those things exist in a way on the page, seeing what the structure of exposition, then rising, you know, conflict is rising, and then climax, and then falling action. 

So being able to see them. If you can’t see them, how do you enact them? I do that with my freshmen, and then I get them back as sophomores and teach them acting technique on scene study. And we go backward in time, starting with really contemporary playwrights. Oktar and Annie Baker, very contemporary playwrights.

And then we go back like a couple decades and we take like the 1980s through the aughts and stuff that would have been like coming out when I was younger titles that would have been on Broadway or current at the time. And then the last round is, the old dead guys round, I call it. Because we go back to Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller and Adrian Kennedy. 

Mack Hagood: You were talking about script analysis, and, you know, I know one form of an actor’s preparation is to sort of read a script in advance, mark up the script, thinking about the goals or the backstory of their character, maybe marking out the individual beats of a scene, these inflection points where the tone changes or the characters tactics shift, or you need to pause for a joke to land, something like that. 

Robin Miles: Right. 

Mack Hagood: How does an audiobook narrator prepare? Is it the same process or is this a different job?

Robin Miles: It is. It’s a different job. Although, I don’t ever forget about my actor sensibilities. And, a lot of that script marking in the dialogue is going to be very similar. Scenes. Because they’re scenes. However, for an audiobook narrator. Wow, I mark the tone. I mark who’s talking in the scene coming up so as I change a chapter or a section changes.

I mark who’s in it so I can make that sort of mental adjustment to where I am and what’s about to happen. Complicated text, British authors, or just more erudite writing with longer sentence structure might really require that I mark on long thoughts where I’m going to breathe. 

Mack Hagood: Hmm. 

Robin Miles: I want to be like a jazz musician. I want to be in the pocket. My dad was a jazz musician. 

Mack Hagood: Oh, really? Wow. 

Robin Miles: I want to be in the pocket. Which means I want to be in flow and living in the moment. So I want to bring down the number of errors I make because every time I make an error it’s a slight interruption to being in it. Cause I gotta come out, and I gotta drop the cursor, and then restart the session.

And I try to stay in it as much as possible, I just keep breathing, hanging in that moment I was in, just keep breathing, stay there. But it is an interruption. So when I’m prepping my piece, if there, like I said, I’ll mark breaths, things that are just so long I need to figure out where I’m gonna breathe.

If there’s an antithesis, a comparison, between two things in a sentence and they’re far away from each other, I’ll underline the first one and I’ll mark an “A” over the top of it on an iPad. I got my little stylus. And, then I’ll draw a line under element “B”, the other part of the antithesis, so that I know that that comparison is there and I’m about to compare two things.

Mack Hagood: So that you can put a certain kind of emphasis on the front end of that sentence and then a different kind on the back end?

Robin Miles: Yes. Yeah, because we are humans who speak English and the ear is accustomed to the music of English. And so, if I know the music of English, then I’ve got to find a way to deliver on the music of English. And if I miss something, you know, I go, “Oh, that was a comparison. I need to go back” Because I didn’t set up those two things to be compared.

Mack Hagood: You also have to switch between characters. So it sounded like part of your marking up was making sure you see who’s speaking when. So that you don’t get halfway into a sentence and then realize it’s a different character. Cause I hear that. I hear some audio book narrators do that. I can hear like, “Oh, they just realized they were supposed to be a person.” 

Robin Miles: And that’s when you should stop yourself and re-record. That’s what you do. But, I always mark in the left column at the sentence head, at the margin, who’s speaking. And I have a system for marking that. So that when I mark, I use the least effort doing the marking, but that it’s clear what I’m doing.

And you know how you get to the end of a line and you get to the tag phrase of the tag line that says, “She whispered,” while continuing to search for her mittens on the shelf, right? And you know, you read it and you’re, blah, blah, blah, “She whispered,” Damn. And then you gotta…

Mack Hagood: You got to go back and whisper it.

Robin Miles: So, you know, I’ll use a little IPA symbol (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbol for “wha” the “wh.”

And it’s really whispered, right? We don’t really invest in that whole puff of air much anymore, but I’ll just use that little W with a circle drawn around it. And that means the character’s whispering, so I know that that’s what’s going on.

Mack Hagood: Okay. I’m so glad you brought up IPA because I know you studied at Yale.

I studied acting, as an undergrad at Tulane for a little while with, Yale MFA named Ron Gorel. Who had students like Willem Dafoe. There were a couple of other Yale faculty who were at Tulane at that time. And-

Robin Miles: Wow, nice!

Mack Hagood: I remember these guys throwing down some real rigor and like, and one part of the training that I remember was there was the International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA. Could you maybe talk about what that is, and how an actor or an audiobook narrator might deploy that in their work?

Robin Miles: Sure, let me start with, what is it? The International Phonetic Alphabet is a system of symbols that essentially have a one to one correlation to the sounds of language. So you’ve got a symbol for every single phoneme, meaning, like, single unit of sound. So, every consonant, like, k, p, t, vvv, all have a symbol.

And all the vowel sounds, the open sounds without consonant breaks, like A, E, I, O, U,  all have a symbol. And when you get to compound sounds like, pay, my, boy, diphthongs and triphthongs, higher power, you break them down into units. So, boy is bo-y. 

Mack Hagood: Mm. 

Robin Miles: Bo-y. It’s two things, actually. And so, it’s a very exact way of rendering the sounds in a language.

So we have a whole bunch of symbols that we use in English, but there’s a whole bunch of ones that we don’t use because those aren’t our sounds. Like the rolled R in Spanish, and the rolled R in French. One’s rolled in the front, one’s rolled in the back. They’re different symbols. 

Mack Hagood: Mm 

Robin Miles: There’s a different symbol for the IH, IH, like the, the word IH, I in German.

And there’s another one for the CH in Hanukkah. So again, you can be very exact about indicating how to say a word. And you can even transcribe a whole sentence in IPA. A whole speech in IPA. That’s one of the exercises that we do. Why is it helpful? Because wow, when you’re doing things particularly in an accent, this is where it becomes really, really useful.

If there’s a sound in that language that doesn’t exist in ours, we’re not going to get it right unless we familiarize ourselves with that. One of the things that I’m always arguing about is people use the schwa, the upside down little.  The  sound, it’s also known as the sound of hesitation, like , , right?

They stick that in for so many other words, sounds in English, and it’s not really that sound. And so when I hear people oftentimes, using that as the placeholder for other sounds. It just doesn’t work. And, I’ll tell you, the specificity level I like to get to, class, the way people speak, class, region, dialect, the way people speak in different places, like you’ll hear people in New York say, my mother, my father, my mother, that’s a straight up schwa.

But there are a lot of people who say, my mother, , . Is it ah, , ? Those are different sounds. And they really do, they can be culturally specific, and they can also be class specific. And it’s the same in German. I used to sing opera at one point, and I took a master class at Juilliard. I just went and, you know, paid money to go sit and hear this brilliant person.

And he talked about the sound, the ends of words in Germany do the same thing as they do here. Like father, mother, father, mother, father, mother. Same thing. And it’s an expression, it can be of class or culture, or, you know, somebody code switching within their own culture might go from one to another depending on the situation they’re in.

You hear the shift and you know what they’re doing.

Mack Hagood: So having that ability to sort of score that kind of thing, first of all, just having an awareness that these differentials exist and having a code for them allows you to really suss out the complexity in something.

It’s like it’s like having a wider palette of colors, vocal colors, and phonetic colors

Robin Miles: I love that analogy. Colors. I want max colors so that I can be true to what the author wrote and who the characters are that they created. And I’m really strong about that, strongly opinionated about that. I didn’t write the book. I can’t take credit for that and it’s not my job to then change that book and make it quote unquote mine.

That is not what I’m there for. I am in service to that author. I’m in service to the words, which means get your ego out of the way. And it’s funny because it is, it’s physiological when you approach it that way. Like, at the end of the day, if I’ve been narrating for whatever, four, six hours. I have given over my body, my breathing pattern, my feelings to this story and to these characters in service to that author.

And it’s like when I get out, it’s very funny. You’d think, right, that after talking for six hours, all you’d want to do is shut up and sit in a corner and watch TV and have somebody else do the acting

Mack Hagood:  Uh-huh. 

Robin Miles: That makes sense. First thing I wanna do is talk and hear me and my opinions and my voice again, so I can kind of reclaim them again.

Because I’ve let them occupy my space for the last six hours.

Mack Hagood: I mean, I love this idea of physically embodying a text and kind of being possessed by a text and being the tool of, like, physically, like, that’s a fascinating thing to think about.

Robin Miles: You know what? I honestly think it’s in a way. It’s easier to do that if you’re able to accomplish the moving of the ego aside. 

Mack Hagood: Mm-hm. 

Robin Miles: It’s not easy. But if you’re able to accomplish that, let the music play through you 

Mack Hagood: Mm-hm. 

Robin Miles: And you know what’s interesting is that the body doesn’t lie. And I’m an ex-dancer.

I started out in this business as a dancer. Which is very far away from sitting in a tiny little booth with the door closed where you can’t move. It’s far from where I started. But, the body doesn’t lie. And so, if I feel something in my gut, like that’s not right. That was just not right. And I’ll do it again.

And I may not even be able to tell you why. I just know. The feeling was, that was wrong, or, mm, that was too big, it’s over the top, my body is like going, mm, mm, nope, nope, nope, 

Mack Hagood: Mm hmm. 

Robin Miles: And I just have to listen to it. And you know, Uta Hagen, the famous Uta Hagen, who trained so many actors in her day, just before she retired, I was in her class as a very young actor in New York, first coming here. 

Mack Hagood: Mm hmm. 

Robin Miles: And she used to say.

“When you’re in a scene,” and like the classic Chekhov scene, “Masha, she cries,” is in parentheses. I always used to panic when I saw that, because I’m not a crier. Fake crying is not in my toolbox. But she used to say, when that happens, the text tells you that you don’t go in and then try to cry and pop out the tears.

She said what most people do in our culture, and this is just culturally who we are, we tend to try and manage or suppress the tears. And as soon as you do that, what’s so wacky, is your body feels you clamping down, trying to hold, you know, speak, you know, without all over the place. And your body goes, wow, I’m doing all those things I do when I cry.

I must be crying, and the tears come out. They just go. 

Mack Hagood: It’s fighting the tears that brings them.

Robin Miles: Yeah, but your body knows that scenario. You’ve been in it many times. And then it just produces the tears. It’s like the most organic thing I’ve ever heard of, and now I’ve incorporated it into my teaching as well.

Mack Hagood: I mean, it’s so amazing to hear about your technique because I, I think about like, I don’t know, like a Robin Miles tour de force, I think, would be your performance of Nalo Hopkinson’s, Midnight Robber, 

Robin Miles: Oh, I love that book. I’m so glad. 

Mack Hagood: Oh my gosh, your performance is so amazing. Like, for those who don’t know, it’s this Afrofuturist novel.

It’s a little hard to describe, but it’s basically about a young girl who gets exiled on another planet in another dimension. 

Robin Miles: Dimension, yeah. 

Mack Hagood: And, and she gradually takes on the identity of this figure from Caribbean folklore, the Midnight Robber, who dresses in black, speaks in poetry, steals from the rich and gives to the poor. But the dialogue and the narration are all written in this kind of Caribbean vernacular.

And we had this audio scholar on the show recently, audiobook scholar Matthew Rubery, and he talked about how we often culturally privileged the printed book as the site of real reading. 

Right. But, he pointed out that often the readers, you know, what he called the brain voice, it’s not as good as a performance by a great narrator.

And to me, this is Midnight Robber is the ultimate example, because I read Hopkinson’s book in print and I’m not like, totally ignorant of like the Black Atlantic or Caribbean culture, but my head voice just didn’t have the cultural or linguistic experience to open up the text the way your performance did.

And it’s not just like the pronunciation of words. It’s the cadences, it’s the subtextual stuff that’s going on.

That you need a certain knowledge to be able to put forward. And I mean, also this is a book that’s about Black oral traditions, right? It’s like, it’s about oral storytelling.

There’s like storytellers in the book and there’s this kind of verbal jousting, Tan Tan the Robber Queen, the main character. I mean, she’s basically like a battle rapper, right? 

Robin Miles: Mm-hm. 

Mack Hagood: It makes sense on so many levels for this to be an audiobook.  I don’t even know what my question is here.

I’m just raving about your performance, but like how did you approach that? 

Robin Miles: Well, firstly, you start with your author. And Nalo is visionary and brilliant. So you have to start with that. You can’t do something fantastic with writing unless the writing gives you the opportunity. It’s like agents, actress agents, managers. When they get a script that’s Oscar-worthy, they usually know it because there’s a journey embedded in the script that allows you to give an Oscar-worthy performance.

See what I mean? So, I’m always looking out for something that I can really do something with, and I love working with authors like Nalo. As I was reading it and prepping it, it’s funny because I did this many years ago, but I remember this. Reading it through the first time and realizing she spelled words in different ways.

And I was like, “These are people from different Caribbean Islands.” Like, Haiti is French influenced. And some of the words and phrases, I was like, this one’s Haitian. And then another one, I realized, oh, this one’s from a Spanish speaking Caribbean country. And this one’s from an English speaking Caribbean country.

And so I noticed that running through, and I finished the book, prepped it, and I went, I gotta go back, and do it again, and mark for that before I started.

Mack Hagood: And is this knowledge that you had from your studies of phonetics or?

Robin Miles: I studied Spanish in high school through college. I was a, I wasn’t a Spanish minor, but I was required to have literature fluency in a foreign language.  I went to Yale undergrad before I went to the drama school, and I wanted to be a theater studies major, but they had decided, oh, you’re not coming to Yale and just park yourself in acting classes and getting through. 

No, no, no. So they devised these units. You had to decide what you were interested in. And for me, I loved classics so I had one unit in that and I liked politics. I had another one with political theater and then politics of an era.

But you had to have foreign language fluency and be able to read dramatic texts in that foreign language. Spanish was mine. And then I also decided to take on a third language, which was French, so I studied that while I was there, so that allows me to wrap my lips and my tongue around the sounds and the words and the phrases and like how they connect in other languages.

But wow, I’m not even sure if I’m answering your question. I think I’m far away from it.  

Mack Hagood: No, no. So there’s the linguistic piece. There’s also the, the cultural piece. 

Robin Miles: Cultural piece. My family is from, my nuclear family is Jamaican, but I also have cousins who’s like, their dad’s from Antigua. And, you know, so we’re, we’re kind of a multiracial, multicultural , and on my mom’s side, Caribbean based family. So I grew up with my great aunties and they all had accents.

I grew up with my grandparents and, you know, sometimes you grow up with a generation that comes from somewhere and they have an accent and you’re a kid and you don’t actually realize it. I didn’t realize it till way later that I’d been living in a house with two people who had strong accents.

But they had literate accents because they were both English professors. 

Mack Hagood: Oh, wow. 

Robin Miles: My grandfather was a professor of Shakespeare and Victorian poetry. Those were his two subjects.

Mack Hagood: That’s your grandfather? Is this the Jamaican side of the family.

Robin Miles: This is the Jamaican side. 

Mack Hagood: This might be a stereotype, but I’ve had friends tell me that Jamaican parents are very demanding about academic excellence and stuff. It’s kind of slotting into that stereotype.

Robin Miles: Mm-hmm. Oh, we have a couple of stereotypes that always make me chuckle. The other one is like, Jamaican folks are always employed because we’ll take two, three, four jobs. And friends of mine used to laugh. Because when I was at Yale in school, I had no money. I was on financial aid, and I had to, I worked in a sweet shop, I worked in the office running like a little theater. I was a Yale bartender, so I was being shopped out to different places to bartend, and a couple of my friends would be like, “How many jobs you got?”

“You got, what, you got three jobs? What’s the matter with you? You lazy?”

You know, that’s, that’s the stereotype and of course the joke. But that’s what I had to do to make it through school. Exhausted myself, but somehow made it through.

Mack Hagood: Oh, well, this is, I mean, so this is incredible. I mean, you were, you were bringing a lot to the table in terms of interpreting this particular text.

Robin Miles: Yeah, it was a really good fit. And fit is, I do think, a lot of it as well. I’m really lucky I fit this industry really well. And the only reason why I found myself here is because I got out of Yale drama school. I was booking work. I was going out doing a thing, you know, a regional theater, coming back.

I was doing, like short spots on, on soap operas before that whole thing folded. I was doing the thing you do. And then I got a Broadway show, you know, like that’s what actors do. But I always had community service. My parents always had a community service thing that they did.

Mack Hagood: Mm hmm. 

Robin Miles: And so it felt weird to me to be in New York City. And I’m really privileged.

Right? I got to grow up in the suburbs in a house. I got to go to college. And not just any college. I got to go to Yale. And then back there again. Now, truth be told, I got debts up the wazoo still. Cause, you know, I didn’t have any money, so I had to take on full loans. But, I really have lived an amazing, in my opinion, just amazingly privileged life.

And I’m incredibly grateful for it every single moment of my life. I wanted community service. And one day I was coming out of a hair salon and across the street was the lighthouse for the blind building.

And I saw that and I went, ding! I could maybe read for the blind. That could be my new community service. So I called, and they said, Well, you know, mostly what we do is, you know, we read their mail to them and stuff like that. But probably what you should do is call the American Foundation for the Blind. And I did. 

Mack Hagood: Yep. 

Robin Miles: They liked my voice on the phone. They said, “Come on in and audition.” I came in and auditioned. I’d never done this before. I’d never listened to an audiobook. And I was rejected by the client, which was the National Library Service, NLS, down in Washington, at the time. They really wanted you not to interpret anything.

They just wanted you to read with incredibly crisp, clear diction, that part I had. But they didn’t want not too much acting. And, truth be told, there are a lot of people who are visually impaired or blind or, Unable to maybe, due to Parkinson’s, hold a book steady, you know, who might be clients at a library.

And they have these readers that allow them to listen, at increased speeds, sped up. So, speed reading with the eyes, speed reading with the ears. And so, all that acting, they felt, kind of got in the way. It was when I made it into the commercial world that the acting chops really became valuable. And I got an earphone. My first earphone award came from, I think it was my second book, for recorded books. and my colleague and friend, Suzanne Torin, who is an amazing narrator, was the person who said, I think these people need to hear you. And she made a call and made it possible. 

Mack Hagood: So, she was your entryway into, into the, the industry?

Robin Miles: Yes. She was the phone call maker and the advocate for me. and as our lives have gone on, she’s directed me on books. I’ve directed her on books. We have this wonderful, we should just own a publishing company together because we do all that stuff. She’s also remarkable. And then she speaks French fluently and she speaks Polish fluently.

I mean, she’s just, yeah, jaw-dropping.  

Mack Hagood: So since you brought it up, maybe we can eventually go back to talking about technique a little bit more. But could we talk about the roles in audiobook production, like you mentioned a director, so some people might be surprised to hear that there is a director in audiobook production.

So what are the different roles? What’s the process of recording an audiobook from start to finish?

Robin Miles: Wow, this is lifting up the hood of a car and going, let me show you how the engine works.

Mack Hagood: Yes, I want to know. 

Robin Miles: So in terms of process, a book arrives from a publisher. Sometimes it’s still in manuscript state and there may be a final edit. And the narrator is chosen, either approached, you know, the production team will have an idea of who they want to voice it, or they might put it out there for different agents or different producers to do the casting.

But, they’ll listen to the samples, if that’s the way they’re going and there are multiple people, they’ll choose one, make the offer.

Mack Hagood: Just to clarify when you say the production team like are these people from the print publisher?

Robin Miles: Well, that depends. See, the way audiobooks get made, you might have someplace like Hachette or Harper or Simon and Schuster that are big, well known print publishers. And within that big house, there is an audiobook division. And so, what used to happen back in the day when I was young, it used to be that a book would do a bit of business.

And, get good reviews, and they’ll say, okay, let’s now make it into an audiobook. Flash forward to the present. It’s now, a book is coming up through the pipeline to be released. We want to release it in all formats simultaneously. So you’ll be working on the audiobook while they’re still, you know, finalizing the release of the hardcover or, you know, or whatever.

The print version, the ebook version, all of that. And so that team is typically the team at the audiobook division that I’ll be dealing with. Depending on your level of experience, and also the sort of the values of the publishing company. They’ll either assign a director, director-engineer pair to work on the book.

I’ll come in and I’ll have a director who I’ve probably talked to once or twice about, pronunciations and character voices and size of things. I’ll go in like with Nora Jemison’s book. I love that team.

Mack Hagood: Are you talking about, The City We Became 

Robin Miles: The City We Became and the second book that’s, actually up for an Audi this year is, The City We Became, the second one. Oh my goodness, 

Mack Hagood: Oh, right. Yeah, the other one is similar. 

Robin Miles: Yeah, now I’m forgetting which one is which. I have to go back and take a look because I forget which one’s which. Elise Green and Michelle Figueroa and I are a team.

So I go in, and everybody’s got their ear listening to it. And everybody has their knowledge pockets. So, Michelle will bring in something that she knows from her neighborhood or her culture or her background. And Elise will bring in something that she knows. And she’s a really good director. Like, I get actual directions from Elise.

I love that, and I welcome it. There are a lot of, now, audiobook narrators who don’t really want to be directed. But if I can give that, “You be my outside ears job” to somebody else, I feel I can kind of just stay in the pocket, come out of it less. Redo Things. That series also, those two books, also have a lot of post production on them.

It’s a, not only a performance, it’s been, there’s sound effects, it’s like audiobooks at another level. And it’s on steroids, cause it really is huge, huge, wonderful characters, performances. A wonderful villain who allows me to use every sound of my voice, you know, because she’s literally otherworldly.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. 

Robin Miles: And, and even though they’re big and otherworldly, you still have to ground it. And, remember making the invisible visible. What, what, what’s driving her? 

what is she, what is she feeling? What is she experiencing? What does she want? Who is she talking to and what is she trying to get what she wants?

You still have to ground it and all that stuff. Even if you make the colors, you dial up from pastel, which you might use in a more everyday novel. A mainstream novel, you have your colors are more in the pastel range, or the majority of them will be. And then with The City We Became, you’re just gonna dial that into Technicolor.

Mack Hagood: I haven’t gotten to that one. I did listen to N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which you did and it’s kind of interesting because you know if we were compared to say Midnight Robber 

Robin Miles: Mm-hm. 

Mack Hagood: You kind of had this world of accents, but all within the Caribbean and then but with something like Broken Earth it’s like this whole planet And you’ve got… 

Robin Miles: Everywhere! 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. You’ve got people of different races, different cultures, you know, in some, you know, I guess in a lot of books, because you do a lot of science fiction, speculative fiction, you’ve got people of different planets, different species, people who aren’t people, people who are other, you know, alien species.

How do you, how do you approach voicing such a diverse cast of characters as a narrator?

Robin Miles: I am so glad that you asked that, because to me that is so much fun. It really allows me to be as creative as I can be. When I have a fantasy world or a sci-fi world, you know, planets that don’t exist, I have two ways of going about it, particularly with fantasy. If I have a group of people, you know, oftentimes those books have a map, like a fantasy book will have a map of this fantasy landscape.

And so you’ll see the terrain and you’ll see these people live off the coast on this big island or these people live up in the mountains. I’ll choose one or two accents that would be considered, you know, easily identifiable. And I’ll either assign it to that, that group regionally. Or, if it’s fantasy and I don’t want to pull too much from one accent, I’ll do what I call a mashup.

So, I’ll take for instance, I’ll take the sounds of German, and then what I will do is I will add the rhythm pattern of Nigeria. Because this is a race of people who are dominant in their area, culturally dominant, or militarily dominant. And so I’ll take two cultures that might have those characteristics or have operated that way in our world.

And I’ll just go mash. 

Mack Hagood: You really are playing jazz 

Robin Miles: I love it. I totally love that. So I’ve done that with a couple of things where I’ll just take, like, that was one of my ones that I remember is taking German sounds and then mashing it up with the rhythm of Nigerian speech. But the other thing is, I had friends at the drama school who were from Norway.

There’s a pipeline of Norwegian theater artists, and Scandinavian really, it’s not just Norway, who had come to Yale Drama School, which we’re sup posed to call now the David Geffen School of Drama 

Mack Hagood: Right? Yeah. 

Robin Miles: Now got a new name. and so I was around them a lot. And, then when I was in New York City, in the Uta Hagen class, I had two friends, one Swedish, one Norwegian who were in class with me.

One of which I’m still friends with. I still keep in touch with Christian. And, So I got to be around a lot of people who were from Norway, and Swedish. And so, I started to be able to really hear their speech and sometimes, like I’ll tinge it with a little bit more German, you know, or just so that it’s not so strictly one thing in a fantasy, in a fantasy novel.

Or sometimes it’s like, oh, she’s just so straight up, this thing or the other. I always feel like, also, I want to add sounds from different cultures that generally don’t get represented. 

Because people just don’t think about it.

Mack Hagood: Oh, wow. 

Robin Miles: Yeah, I’ll try and add it. There’s a Hawaiian character. I just need flavors. Just need flavors. But just so that I’m creating that ideal Star Trek world. You know, when Star Trek hit, it was like they had this spaceship with people from all these different countries that are often at war or totally marginalized. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. 

Robin Miles: And they’re all working together to do something greater than themselves, which is, that’s what theater does.

The whole is greater than the parts. And other parts are varied. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah, 

Robin Miles: So, that’s my little, my way of sort of bringing, casting the world so that it reflects the world that we see now in the world that we 

Mack Hagood: I mean, you’re talking about the politics of representation in voice there. Right.

Robin Miles: Absolutely.

Mack Hagood: And I mean I guess I can see two different, like a certain tension there, right?

Robin Miles: Hmm.

Mack Hagood: Especially early history is really rife with minstrelsy and the sort of the misrepresentation of black voices. Even as recently as 2020, there was this case where the hip-hop scholar, Regina Bradley, there was a white voice actor who read an essay of hers. I don’t know if you heard about this, but I honestly don’t know what this guy thought he was doing, but it was like a really bizarre and really offensive dialect. It just sounded outrageous. 

Robin Miles: Mm. 

Mack Hagood: Those things are really clearly way beyond the boundaries of ethical representation. Right? But on the other hand, I could see another kind of danger. Which is to say, we sort of vote vocal segregation like people are only allowed to voice people who are exactly like them. 

And which could lead to typecasting, right? So I guess I’m wondering what you think about that? Have you ever felt like you’re being typecast as a woman of color? Like I’m just curious about that.

Robin Miles: This is, wow. You have basically…that’s the story of my life. I remember being a young actor, and I was a musical theater actor, so I was a singer, when Les Mis was coming here and casting, and they would not see me. A young actor of color to play a street urchin child of a prostitute, and there’s no father in sight.

So, frankly, either one of those roles could have been anybody, really. They absolutely would not allow me to audition. Now, poetic justice. What is this, 30 years later? I saw the final production before it closed about, I don’t know, maybe 8 years ago. And there was a black actress playing that role. But I couldn’t get anywhere near it. And I’m a vocal person. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah.  

Robin Miles: I am. I remember going into an audition once. Now, I had an agent. So I’m not talking about, like, nobody, unrepresented actor that people don’t know whether, you know, you don’t have anybody to vouch for you. I literally was in Three of Us studios, big studio where they audition. And I was auditioning for one thing and I saw, ooh, Craig Lucas play.

And I like Craig Lucas’ writing. So I went across to the people running that audition and I said, I’d really like to audition for this blah blah blah role because I know the play. I said, I’m, I’m at, J. Michael Bloom. Philip Carlson’s my agent. And we’re talking about a powerful agent. This is the agent who tapped Paul Giamatti and I at the same time at the end of our year. He took the two of us. That’s it.

Mack Hagood: Giamatti being another Yale grad. 

Robin Miles: Yeah, we were in the same class. With Lance Reddick, actually, the three of us. God rest his soul. He passed away recently. So sad. So I said, I can call my agent and have them submit me. Like, I just told you that I have a very powerful agent, you know, a well known agent. She looked at me with terror in her eyes, like I was from the NAACP race police and she was going to get, you know, written up.

This was 30 years ago. They were not open. This is a person in this play, like, who has a husband, but there’s no family. There’s no children. It’s not like it’s now going to mean we have to cast all these people to be racially in line. It was easy. It was easy. We do this all the time because now we’re in Shonda-land.

We’re in Shonda Rhimes land. And everybody wants a piece of that success that Shonda has. And so, including people of color and lots of cultures is part of what she does. And other people are doing it now, but 30 years ago? No. How does that relate to audiobooks? I tell my students all the time, be careful what you ask for.

You might get it. If you want to segregate an industry and then only be able to play what your DNA test says you are? Really? Is that really what you want? Think about that. So, but there is something, and, and it’s because we’re a culture. That is so horrible at balance. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. 

Robin Miles: American culture has to be all the way over here, or all the way to the other extreme.

And we keep going, we keep literally throwing our weight all the way, missing the mark. Is that called Hamartia in Greek? Missing the mark? And then all the way over to the other side, completely missing the whole middle ground that’s balance. We are a culture, and I use this metaphor, it’s like, we have this basket of shoes, and the shoes are the stories of all the cultures that are in our culture.

We’re a multicultural place, right? We’ve got all these different people from different places. But we also have a lot of groups that get marginalized, whose stories aren’t wanted and weren’t told for many years. And I mean women. I mean the queer community. I mean the Native American community, the Hispanic community, the Black community.

The disabled community. There’s, there’s so many people that have been othered and pushed to the fringes and it’s like, we don’t want your voices. And they’re also told they can’t be American. That’s a big question. Like, who can be American? Who can play the role of just an American that’s just been written?

It’s beginning to change now, but we’re also looking like we’re going to slide back. So there’s this bucket, right, this basket of shoes, and white actors and white culture are taking out the shoes that belong to all these other cultures and not even letting people who are of those cultures wear their own shoes, which is where you get yellow face and black face and brown face.

Or erasure, taking a role that is maybe based on somebody who was, who was black or Hispanic, and then just rewriting it and making them white. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. 

Robin Miles: And the danger of that is that you have a lot of white supremacists in this country who will tell you how black people and Hispanic people have never contributed anything to this country.

Mack Hagood: hmm, 

Robin Miles: Because their contributions aren’t included in the history books. And you know, when entertainment takes their story and makes it into something else, half the time they’re completely erased off the planet, so you don’t even know that, you know, they came up with this invention or that invention, or were prominent in this, that, or the other.

And so you’ve got a whole bunch of people who really believe it because they don’t even know. 

Mack Hagood: Right. 

Robin Miles: It’s just not in the history books. So my position is We are in a healing beat. I’m trying to find this middle ground, right? I’m trying to enter this middle ground. But the first thing that has to happen is you have to give those people their shoes back.

You have to give all those groups their own shoes, their own stories back to write, to generate from a place of authenticity. And then you have to allow those actors that know that experience to portray them. And once That’s been reclaimed, and we’ve been allowed to be who we are, and also be American. We will have the grace, I do strongly believe, to put the shoes in the basket and say, Other people can pick from them when I’m allowed to pick from the basket, too.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. 

Robin Miles: Do you see what I mean? But we keep going back and forth between these two poles. And the truth is, we have to figure out a way to achieve middle ground. We do. We have to. Or else we’re just going to keep experiencing this over and over again. And, and, you know, I belong to a university, and it’s like any other place that wants to have, more inclusion and understanding between groups that are very different.

You know, I’d go to a DEI meeting, and then I would start to hear or experience the ire that, , that, white people as opposed to non white people have about this process of bringing other people in. And we had some, some experiences where agents right now realize they don’t have people of color in their roster.

Like a whole lot of people of color and, and the queer community as well. And so they’re trying to, fill in those gaps. And so There’s this fear that, oh my God, agents want people of color. They don’t want white people anymore. And I raised my hand and I just went, I just stood up and I said, Wait ten minutes.

Mack Hagood: Right. 

Robin Miles: I’ve been on this planet long enough to know if you wait ten minutes, the pendul is going to swing back at you. It always does because we can’t seem to get in balance. We just, and then it’ll go back and then we’re not wanted anymore. When I was out there, I had agents who were interested and say, but we have, we have one black actress, or we have two that are, you know, like, we have a dark skinned person and a light skinned actress.

We, they couldn’t afford to have any more 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. 

Robin Miles: because there wasn’t enough to employ all the people in their own house. So they literally have their own two actresses competing against each other for a job.

And with no other job behind 

Mack Hagood: wanting enough jobs. 

Robin Miles: Right. So that’s what I, I grew up with and came out of. , and, and yeah, it’s changed so much so that I’m like, okay, I’m ready for my closeup Mr.

DeMille. All right. And you know, I’m going to go, I’m, you know, decided I’m going to go back , seek an agent and, and actually let them do my negotiations. Cause I’ve been doing it as a business person on my own for a long time.

So, the politics of it, I know that was the 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. 

Robin Miles: question. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah, no. 

Robin Miles: We have to, we have to first let marginalized people have their shoes back. Let them write their stories, perform their stories. , before we expect them to be generous enough to put their shoes back in the basket they’ve never been able to draw from and that their stories have been taken to.

Mack Hagood: Right. 

Robin Miles: Let them have them, you know, and, and I don’t feel the same way, equally because I don’t think it’s an equal situation when it comes to marginalized people and people of color, ethnic minorities especially, , but I, I really do include all marginalized people and I didn’t mention, , Jews as a group, but they have gone through this too.

And now it’s happening again with the politics in the world. So, if you’re from a minority group, and like African Americans are about 12 percent of the population, Asians are less than that, Native Americans are less than that. if you’re from a marginalized group, you are surrounded by the dominant culture.

It’s everywhere, and you better know how it works if you want to survive. If you want to get and hold a job, if you want to make it through school, if you want, need, you have to negotiate uncomfortable situations in which you are always the minority. You may not have an ally or an advocate. You have to learn how, how do they work?

What’s important to them? How do 

they 

Mack Hagood: What do they sound like? 

Robin Miles: What do they sound like? How do I fold into it so that I don’t stick out? You have to learn all of that. Or you just grew up in it and you don’t know any other way. That happens a 

Mack Hagood: So , If I’m 

Robin Miles: my playing, my, like, I get hired a lot to play Irish Americans and Jewish Americans.

Mack Hagood:  h. 

Robin Miles: A lot. Just did, , a couple summers ago, Kea Cawthron, the playwright, wrote a book, her first or second novel, I think, as a playwright, The Moon and the Mars, about a little girl whose dad is black and her mom’s Irish, and both parents die, I think, of smallpox or a disease. So it’s her grannies who raise her, and it’s New York, I think it’s during the Civil War, or is it after?

After. Draft rights. Eh, yeah, yeah, draft rights. So she’s running between those two neighborhoods, being cared for by those two women. And so depending on the family she’s with, they’re either Irish or they’re African American. lots of actual stories that, , just did Dennis Lane’s Small Mercies, which is again the tension between the black community and the Irish community in Boston.

and there’s a couple of other ones too, about black people who have had to, , who have been passing. And they’ve had to disappear within a community. So, typically, you’re going to find people who have, who have that pressure to blend in, to disappear. Of course they’re going to be able to play characters in the dominant 

Mack Hagood:  h. 

Robin Miles: We’re inundated with it. We’re saturated by it, like the dominant culture is. We’ve watched Cheers, right? We’ve watched The Sopranos. , the latest one being The Bear, you know, about, the Italian family in Philadelphia with the restaurant. We’ve, we’ve been adjacent to that, not to mention, we, we raise your children and we clean your houses.

We are adjacent to your culture or part of it constantly. So it’s much easier for a black actor or a Hispanic actor or an Asian actor to play a character outside of their race, if it’s a dominant culture. Then it would be for a white actor who might not have access to any of those things to play a black character or an Asian character.

I mean, it’s just the numbers and the reality of our survival.

Mack Hagood: And then the reality of available roles it wouldn’t really make a lot of sense to give a job to that white actor anyway

Robin Miles: So,

Mack Hagood: , there is you know

Robin Miles: That’s more of the politics. 

Mack Hagood: Just one little maybe, additional wrinkle to that is that there can be a difference between having an ear for a culture and, and, and having a pretty accurate knowledge of what that culture sounds like, or that what that group sounds like, but actually having the skill, the tools to reproduce that, right?

Like, like, I can hear some pretty amazing jazz solos in my head. I can imagine them actually, but my execution as a musician is maybe not that great. And, and one thing that I’ve, that I’ve, just to give you an

for example, nothing takes me out of a book faster. than a male narrator who can’t do women’s voices or a female narrator who can’t do men’s voices.

And we, we get on with, with the men, we, they quite often will do this kind of breathy, high pitched thing to signify a woman, or women will do this sort of low, dorky, Barney

Rubble sounding thing to signify men. And like, what I love about your men is that Often you don’t even alter pitch and, and, and there’s just a kind of swag you embody. 

Robin Miles: That’s it! You know it! You heard 

Mack Hagood: like you’re in touch with the masculinity of the character instead of doing some kind of vocal drag show. Does, I don’t know, does that resonate for you? Like how? Hmm. 

Robin Miles: I’ve ever heard that put better, to be very honest. It’s, it’s not. It’s not being male. It’s using the different aspects of masculinity. That’s what it is. And like, I start with a couple of different soups based on that. Like, my beef broth is like toxic masculinity. The kind of guy who can’t show any emotion.

The kind of guy that’s like, you know, just cut off. Yeah. Doesn’t let anything in, doesn’t let anything out. Very protective. 

Mack Hagood: hmm. 

Robin Miles: And I think it helps, I have played a man on stage a couple times. I was playing Jenny in ThreePenny Opera. But she doesn’t come to like the third act.

And so, the first two acts, you know, they want to save money on hiring actors. I was one of Mackie’s gang. So I went quickly, got my dad’s fedora, that I keep stuff like that, I have my grandfather’s sweater, I got my dad’s fedora, and I actually wore it on stage. And I put all my hair up underneath it, and I drew on a little mustache, the way my dad used to wear his mustache.

And my sister and my mom came to the show, they had no idea that that gang member was me. 

Mack Hagood: Whoa. Yeah. 

Robin Miles: And then, but it’s, you know, and I put a sock in my pants, honestly, because think about that. Like, male sexuality is externalized. Female sexuality is internalized. So it’s hidden. It’s got this little mysterious quality to it.

If I’m all a flutter and hot to trot for you, , you’re not going to see it because I have a bulge in my pants. It’s, I’m not going to be given 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. 

Robin Miles: Whereas if I’m a guy? I would, I might be. And secondly, if somebody wants to really hurt me and cripple me, all they have to do is kick me in the balls and I’m going down.

And I’m literally one leg length away from everybody around me who could do that. The first time I thought about that, I went, shoot, I want to keep my distance too. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. 

Robin Miles: You know, a certain distance between people. So thinking about the physical reality of maleness and also thinking about Masculinity, the qualities of masculinity.

We all have them to a certain extent, and they blend with femininity to whatever, whatever blend you need. , that’s what I think about. and then I might make a little, you know, vocal change. A couple of guys that I know when they talk , their vowels are always really long. Like all this air is going through their vowels, and so, like, one of my guys will have, like, a vowel thing that they do when they talk.

Ah, it’s just, they hang in their vowels. So that, to me, was also something I was like, oh, mark that, I could use that. You know, I know a few

people who are like that.

Mack Hagood: That’s so interesting. Is that, , is that a vocal expression or is it a physiological thing? ’cause they are bigger. I don’t know about the larynx, or…

Robin Miles: I don’t know, honestly. I heard it, and when I tried to embody it, it made certain, I got feelings that were different from my feminine feelings, and I was like, okay, check, mark that off.

Mack Hagood: And that’s right. And, and it’s working for the listener because it’s working for you. It’s feeling right in your body and, somehow that comes across to me as the listener.

Robin Miles: Yeah. It’s interesting too because I mentioned tears and crying before. I have this videotape of my Uncle Charlie being interviewed. , and it’s like a home tape. It was somebody who wanted to interview a Tuskegee Airman about You know, about being in the Corps and then coming back stateside. And in the course of this interview that I watched, my Uncle Charlie was talking about coming back and then being denied pilot’s jobs.

These guys were fighter pilots, and they couldn’t get a job with any airline.

Because they were black. I mean, solely. And, and also the experience he had, very specifically, he was talking about. Hurts and slights that he endured. , that was one. And then he talked about during the war, , coming back stateside, there were German officer POWs that were held in detention on American soil, , as well as in other places.

But you had these detained German officers that were permitted to use the officers club for recreation, and the black officers were not. And in time of war, if you disobey a direct order, that is, I mean, that’s treason 

Mack Hagood: Right. 

Robin Miles: to disobey a direct order. And so what they would do is the officers, the lieutenants, the captains, etc.

My uncle was a lieutenant colonel. Would go to the door of the officers club two by two. They’d go one night and they would be told they could not enter and they had to go away. And then those two guys couldn’t come back again. They couldn’t. And then they sent another two. But as he was recounting that, the pain of literally risking your life for your country, and being a patriot and a military officer and being denied like that, he began to tear up and cry.

And so, and this is a big, barrel chested , masculine man. And so I was able to see how qualities and experiences filter through that. I try to keep my eye open for dualities, because that’s what really makes humans interesting, is the thing that you are crossed with a thing that people don’t expect, or something that contradicts it in some wonderful or wacky or ironic or sad way.

Mack Hagood: You seem to be, like, radically in touch with the world around you, and with what other people are doing. What’s coming across is like that’s central to your craft.

Robin Miles: It is, what do you, what does an empath do with all that empathy? , I feel like I landed in just the right place. and again, this was like, this was plan B. This wasn’t even plan B, this was like plan C. It was my community service that then turned into something greater. And I do think, you know, I’ve played slaves on everyone, everywhere.

I’ve played slaves in every, like, state, of, of the Union. I’ve played slaves on different planets. and it’s, you know, after a while I was sort of like I had to, to tell my publishers. I had to turn down a couple things. I was like, because filtering that experience is very difficult. So I can only take on a nber of them a year.

Honestly. But it’s the same way that that experience, I feel like I can enter without a lot of effort. Because it’s, now I know it so well, and I’ve read a lot of material and seen a lot. But I also feel that sometimes the marginalization and that feeling of being on the edge and being not fully accepted, has a lot of similarities from marginalized group to marginalized group.

And so I do think, I tell my students, my actors, if you’re going to climb into an experience that you’re not fully familiar with, you have to find a window of some sort of familiarity that you can identify with and then enlarge it. And crawl into it and allow more of the experiences to bleed out from the common one that you 

Mack Hagood: Hmm. 

Robin Miles: If you don’t have a common one, you might want to rethink maybe doing it.

Mack Hagood: Well, it’s been such a pleasure to talk to you. I’ve enjoyed this so much. Thanks for doing this.

Robin Miles: Likewise. It was my pleasure to be here. I always figure I don’t try and push anybody who hates audiobooks to listen to audiobooks. Although I will tell them you hate them for the wrong reason, you need a really good narrator. You had the wrong first experience!

But the fact that I can meet people who love audiobooks and who really appreciate my work, that is, that tells me that I haven’t used my time and all that effort that I put in, in vain. It is. It’s helpful. It’s useful. It’s enjoyable. So thank you. You, you validate all that I do and it’s really, it’s really important to know you’re not like talking into the void.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Well, my pleasure.

[Brass band slowly fades in]

And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks to Robin Miles for being on the show today’s show was edited by Nisso Sacha. Our web person and transcript creator is Katelyn Phan. Music today was by Big Fun Brass Band, who I just recorded on my iPhone while I was dancing in the streets of New Orleans.

Learn more about the show at phantompod.org. We’d love it. If you’d rate and review us on Apple podcasts or your podcast platform of choice, and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks.

The post Robin Miles: Talking Books appeared first on Phantom Power.

Today’s guest is Carolyn Birdsall, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. If you’re a scholar of sound or radio, you likely know her work, particularly her monograph Nazi Soundscapes (AUP, 2012) which was the recipient of the ASCA Book Award in 2013.  Her new book, Radiophilia (Bloomsbury, 2023), examines the love of radio through history. It will be a great value to anyone–from novice to expert–who wants to understand radio studies and think about where it should go in the future. In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss Carolyn’s career and both of her books. We also get into the present state of radio and media studies, as well as the kind of skeptical orientation to media that tends to set sound studies scholars apart from many of their peers.

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

Today’s show was edited by Matt Parker. Transcript and web content by Katelyn Phan.

 [Robotic voice] This is Phantom Power

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, where we talk to incredibly smart and creative, talented people about sound.  I’m Mack Haggood. And if I sound a little Barry White-ish, it’s because I have COVID and I’m not feeling great. But I already had an interview in the can, and I just wanted to get this out to you on schedule if possible, I think that’s going to happen. 

And today’s guest is Carolyn Birdsall. If you’re a scholar of sound or radio, I imagine you already know her work. She’s one of those people who represent the benefit that I get personally out of doing this show, which is I get to finally meet people whose work I’ve been engaging with for a long time.

Carolyn’s definitely one of those people. There’s so much I could have talked to her about including her research on television sound or her methodological work on sensory history or doing oral history. Some of her theoretical work on epistemology and the humanities. But in this interview, I chose to focus on her two books first.

Her award winning 2012 book, Nazi Soundscapes. If there’s any canon at all in historical sound studies, Nazi Soundscapes certainly is in that canon. So we talked about that book for a while. And then we also talk about her new book, which is radiophilia. Radiophilia is a term that she coined as she examines the love of radio.

And I think of Radiophilia as an established scholar book. Quite often a scholar will make their name researching something very specific, say soundscapes in the Nazi era, for example. And they make their contributions there and then they build out a career and then later in their career after teaching for a decade or more and reading tons of other people’s work and really getting a strong sense of the lay of the land in their field of expertise. 

They put out something more general, something that’s a little more reflexive in terms of thinking about the field as a whole. Where the field has been, where it should go. And that’s the kind of book that a senior scholar tends to write in part because only a senior scholar could write that kind of book.

And I think Radiophilia is that type of book. I think it’s going to be of great value to anyone from a novice to an expert who wants to understand radio studies and to think about where it should go in the future.  So in the beginning of the interview, I talked to Carolyn about her background and then we kind of segue into the Nazi Soundscapes book.

And then I would say the second half of the conversation gets a little spicier because we do talk about the field of sound studies. We talk about media studies, some things that I get frustrated with, I kind of raised to her. We had a little bit of back and forth about the presence of fan studies in media studies and if it’s a little bit too much of a presence and yeah, I just enjoyed this conversation a lot. 

We have some really great things down the line coming for you. I kind of went over the entire schedule of the next eight shows in the last episode, so I won’t go over that again right now, but I will say that our next guest, assuming my health holds out,  is Robin Miles, the incredible audiobook narrator.

So, if you have any questions for Robin Miles, I know we’ve got some fans out there,  drop me a line, let me know, you know, hit me up on social media or send me an email. I let me know what you’d like me to ask her. You can find my contact information at phantompod.org, one other thing I want to mention just before we get into the interview, this interview could not have happened without the help of Matt Parker, a longtime Phantom Power listener who is currently a postdoc at The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.

He got in touch with me and was just talking about how much he enjoyed the show. We discussed some things. I listened to some of his amazing audio work. He’s done some work for places like the BBC and he volunteered to help out if I ever needed help with an episode. And indeed I needed help with this one.

You wouldn’t be hearing this. On time on schedule if it weren’t for Matt. So Matt, thank you so much. And also Katelyn Phan. Thanks for doing our web work as usual. My amazing assistant, Katelyn on the transcripts and making the website happen. And I should mention that at the end of today’s episode.

In our Patreon feed, our patrons will hear our what’s good segment where Carolyn Birdsell will talk about something good to do, something good to listen to, and something good to read. That’s always a feature on our episodes in our patron feed. Please think about becoming a patron. I would, I would really appreciate your support. 

Okay. Here it is, my interview with Carolyn Birdsall. I’m going to go to bed now,  enjoy this, and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Mack Hagood: Carolyn, welcome to the show.

Carolyn Birdsall: Thanks for having me.

Mack Hagood: I’ve been following your work for quite some time. So I’m really excited about meeting you and having this opportunity to talk. 

Carolyn Birdsall: Same here. I’m very excited. And I haven’t mentioned it before, but I’m a big fan of your work. 

Mack Hagood: Oh, wow. Well, thank you very much.

I thought maybe we could start off by hearing a little bit about your background, because I know you’re in the Netherlands, but I also know you studied in Australia, so maybe you could just start off with your early history, where did you grow up, what were you into as a kid, that sort of thing.

Carolyn Birdsall: Sure. So I’m originally from Sydney, Australia. So I grew up and lived there until my early 20s. And I haven’t really been asked this question that much before, and I think it’s often hard to reconstruct how different paths and interests all came together. But perhaps it’s important to mention that I took German and history as my main courses at high school.

And when I was a teenager, I spent several months living with a host family near the German city of Cologne, where more than 90 percent of the buildings were severely damaged or unlivable after 1945. So I guess already back then, I was 15, I spent quite some time walking around in an urban and sonic environment that was really quite different from where I was from and where the built environment spans preserved Roman mosaics or mosaic floors and a gothic cathedral through the architectural patchwork of post war reconstruction.

So I think there was already a spark of interest from that experience that drew me back to similar themes when I started to study at university. 

Mack Hagood: Oh, that’s really fascinating. So was this like an exchange program? 

Carolyn Birdsall: Yeah, the funny thing is that my German was really quite bad, but it was the mid nineties and there wasn’t internet.

And so I was just in this sort of funny bubble of going to high school and not really understanding a lot and lots of misunderstandings with the host family who were very nice and who I’m still in touch with. So it was really an experience of not being able to interact very well or communicate very well or make myself understood.

So just really having to observe and listen a lot to the things happening around me. And I think that it’s perhaps more of a formative experience than I’ve ever thought about until today. I think it’s something that made me interested in, in, in Germany, in these cities that went through enormous changes, political upheavals and reconstruction, but really coming at it from, from a kind of position of knowing some things, but also not knowing a lot. And only a really kind of incrementally later understanding and having frameworks for understanding some of the things that I observed and experienced.

Mack Hagood: I think that is a commonality among so many anthropologists and novelists and cultural scholars that there’s some early formative experience in another culture that kind of defamiliarizes everyday, and makes them realize that the home culture is peculiar in itself. And it’s just a kind of orientation to the world that you, that the only travel can really give you, but in only a certain kind of travel, right?

Like not going to a tourist destination, which has been made to be more like your home culture. Actually just being immersed in that way. 

Carolyn Birdsall: Yeah. So, I mean, I think that’s the kind of first spark and then I guess when I studied, you know, there, there wasn’t something called sound studies or sound history at the moment I went to study, but I did do like a double degree at the University of New South Wales and Sydney where I studied.

And so I think I was in a history program where I took all the courses on the history of print media and cinema. As well as urban gender and oral history. But then I was also in a media and communication program where I took courses on the history of media and radio and sound design. But kind of being between these two disciplines, I was often troubled.

By the technologically deterministic view in many of those courses and the reading we had. I remember in particular, there was often a quite un-nuanced account of national socialist uses of radio with state subsidized receivers, in which the authors essentially suggested that, in short,  ensured that all German listeners believed Nazi propaganda.

So I think that’s something that I experienced both in my history degree and in my media and communications degree. So I think that was something that I’d already had an interest in German history and urban environments. And then I started to see that the accounts of how radio was introduced and experienced were very simplistic and deterministic.

And I think it was really a sense of wanting to put the record straight, wanting to understand how things were probably not so straightforward, that in a very slow way put me on the path towards being interested in what eventually became a PhD project on the topic of radio Nazi soundscapes, but it was really a grasping and I think I had the good fortune of auditing a popular music studies course with a colleague whose name is Bruce Johnson, and he became a kind of informal mentor in all things sound related.

I actually visited an anechoic chamber with him at that time as part of an excursion. And he first gave me the tip to read Murray Schaeffer’s (1977) The Tuning of the World book which had been actually republished in the early nineties with the title, The Soundscape. 

And so I guess it was really just with his encouragement and slowly discovering the work of someone like Bruce Smith, who wrote a book called The Acoustic World of Early Modern England in 1999. And then later, obviously, Emily Thompson and Jonathan Stern’s work, that I kind of felt bolstered to pursue an interest in historical soundscapes and listening practices. I mean, it felt, at that moment, it felt like something out of space to be following this interest, but I saw that, “Okay, there are people who are doing it.”

And there was also a colleague who Bruce recommended called Helmi Järviluoma in Finland. And she was already doing comparative historical soundscape research in villages in Finland and elsewhere in Europe. So I thought, “Okay, there are people into this history of sound thing. It’s not totally mad.”

But you know, it did feel like all of my first steps. Also during my PhD, I always encountered people who said, “Wow, sound history, that’s really out there” or the history of listening. So it felt at that time to be a little bit left field to be pursuing this interest.

Mack Hagood: Well, I’d love to come back to your dissertation and your very important book, Nazi Soundscapes. But before, maybe we could finish the career trajectory part and the biography part and just where did you wind up? How did it turn out that you’re, you’re in the Netherlands and so forth? 

Carolyn Birdsall: I’d obviously, as I mentioned before, gotten a taste of living overseas and where perhaps today Sydney and Melbourne seem like global cities and maybe still far away and part of things. Back then, it still felt far away and not part of things. 

I was quite desperate to get back overseas. I managed to find a scholarship in Germany for part time English teaching at a high school, like a state.

It’s called D.A.D. And I was able to study at the University in Düsseldorf at the same time. And I started to attend oral history courses as well as more straightforward German history courses. And so it was there that I started to develop the idea that became my PhD project and was published as Nazi Soundscapes. 7:42

And I guess I didn’t entirely know at that time that a doctoral studies path would be the one I would pursue. I’d actually had thought at one point that, since this interest was so out there, I couldn’t quite see its place. I started to pursue audio engineering and I was doing theater sound design.

I was working for digital radio stations, but when I got to Germany and I was teaching, I followed up on an earlier contact I’d had with a researcher in Amsterdam who encouraged me to write a PhD proposal and it was successful. So that’s where I wrote my PhD at the University of Amsterdam. And I’ve also stayed on in the media studies department as a faculty member since 2009. 

Mack Hagood: So returning to Nazi Soundscapes, you were talking about the rather stereotypical portrayal of radio in Nazi Germany. And I remember you start off that book really talking about the sort of stereotypical role that sound plays in the world’s collective memory of Nazi Germany, you know, the noise of propaganda or the hectoring voice of Hitler or the complicit silence of people in the face of the Holocaust.

Were you sort of thinking from the start, I want to get underneath that and beyond this sort of stereotypical portrayal of sound, like what was your motivation in this project? 

Carolyn Birdsall: Sure. So, I mean, the original title of the PhD thesis was “Between Noise and Silence?” So I think, you know, obviously that initial motivation to question some of these cliches absolutely motivated me to start the PhD with this kind of questioning of the different kinds of, I guess, repertoire that have come down through popular media and cultural memory.

When it came to publishing the book, I thought, “Well, it would be a shame to kind of make that the main focus.” And I wanted to kind of bring out the stronger urban history component to thinking about sound technologies, embodied listening, and space. So I think it worked for starting the project and as a departure point or an entry point, but probably I would say where it ended up going with the research was really closer to what in fact became sound studies and these questions, methodological questions about researching historical soundscapes and kind of thinking about the historical past.

So I think a lot of those debates happening in cultural history, in memory studies, they did influence the way I came to this question of historical sound.

So I did actually do oral history interviews as part of the doctoral research. And Even though I kind of only really use them as bookends in the book at the beginning and the end, and I wrote more extensively about these interviews in other articles, they really did help me think about the way in which the needs of the present inform our act of life.

Asking questions about a particular period and its listening practices, its sound cultures. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. So that the questions that you were going to ask those informants were informed by present day concerns and also their answers too, right? Will be informed by Germany in that particular moment or their surroundings in that particular moment.

Carolyn Birdsall: Absolutely. And I think it’s also perhaps the task of looking for something that was ephemeral often at the time of its emergence. So sound in social life, also makes you think about not just its ephemerality, but also the kind of very strange and creative ways you have to be with the sources that are available to find traces of those sounds.

So I think that kind of search for different bits of fragments and kind of puzzling them together within a kind of more coherent narrative about historical soundscapes and listening practices. It forces you to think about the nature of all these bits and pieces, whether they’re policies or newspaper articles or diaries, letters, autobiographies in addition to those oral history interviews I mentioned. 

So I think in a way it’s an elusive object of study even when you’re dealing with sound in the present. And then it becomes kind of interesting and challenging when you think about sound in the past.

Mack Hagood: So the concerns in Nazi Soundscapes you were thinking through the roles that radio and mediated sound played in fascist aesthetics, fascist culture, the construction of a fascist state. At least that was one of them. And actually now that I’m remembering, because you had this term that I’m thinking about. It’s clearly an effective term, which is affirmative resonance.

That’s like a key idea that I remember. Could you maybe talk a little bit about how radio was deployed in reality in Nazi Germany? Like, how does it differ from the quick stereotypical view that we generally have? 

Carolyn Birdsall: The nuanced account that you’ve mentioned is absolutely consistent with the changes that happen in terms of policy, in terms of production practices, the staffing of radio, the desire to have state subsidized receivers but also to control the listening of the public. Particularly in situations of collective or communal listening. For instance, at school or in radio stations, in places of entertainment and so forth.

 So absolutely, I would say this idea of a political misuse and an instrumentalization of radio for propaganda purposes is consistent with, without maybe a more simplistic idea of a propagandistic radio under national socialism. 

Mack Hagood: Well, the German people were using radio as an entertainment medium before the Nazis rose to power. So I would think any use of propaganda would have to somehow still appeal to an audience that had already been cultivated in terms of using the radio as an entertainment medium, right?

Carolyn Birdsall: Absolutely. So that’s part of why the study really starts in the Weimar period, and I’m looking at Dusseldorf in particular and this regional context of the Rhine Ruhr area. And I’m looking at how the changes in the historical soundscape in everyday life, but also in radio, in sound film, are part of a situation of negotiated change and continuity.

So I’m looking at the ways in which we already have a quite politicized urban soundscape in the context of the 1920s with a lot of battles and street fights between communists and national socialists, but also other right wing groups. So, in a way, even though there’s a tendency to really zoom in on national socialism, when you think about radio and politics, I tried to take a longer periodization. Already starting in the mid 1920s, to think about how certain changes and developments took place in the period prior to 1933. 

Mack Hagood: So what would a sort of daily experience of radio be like for a typical person? What kind of things would they be hearing? Would radio be listened to in that sort of stereotypical family hearth way that we conceptualize old time radio? Was it used more in public spaces? How would a typical person encounter? I know that’s a very big question.

Carolyn Birdsall: Absolutely. The kind of culture of experimentation that defined the Weimar Republic period, we see that as being productive in the years from the start of German radio, from like 1923 and 1924, through to the late 20s.

And even though we have a lot of aesthetic experimentation still happening around 1930/1931, we also can see that there are quite major changes happening in this period where the Depression started. We’re really kicked in. There are a lot of right wing attacks on radio, and that we kind of see a cautious tone emerging.

So, if we look at the period leading up to 1933, a lot of the major genres that we also know from the U.S. radio are established. So sport broadcasts, news, radio plays, and radio drama. A little bit less the kind of soap opera model, of course being in a public broadcast system, literary adaptations, all kinds of experiments around kind of news compilation reportage.

You know, that’s consistent across the whole period. Also the development around different types of music, operatic programming, as well as children’s programming, women’s programming. But I think what we start to see is in this kind of period where it becomes more cautious, there’s a preference for the safe bets.

So programming that’s not leaving program makers open to criticism. 

Mack Hagood: And what would the basis of these criticisms be? Was it already racialized? Like were they playing jazz and they would get criticism for playing? 

Carolyn Birdsall: Yeah. So, in the German context, we’re dealing with a very particular context where from the moment that radio was established, like regulated radio from 1923 onwards, there was a system of censorship.

There was a concept that radio had to be above party political concerns. So already in the period that we think of as being the kind of experimental period of German radio plays and radio-specific or radiophotic explorations. We also have script censorship already happening from the beginning.

And we have advisory boards who are checking scripts before programs are aired. So, I would say that there’s already a level of intervention that is unusual for other contexts. When we get to this later period, already prior to the Nazi takeover in 1933, there are new radio laws that allow for even more state-centralized control over radio.

All radio stations are fully owned by the federal radio board. They’re no longer partly commercial or privately owned in a few cases. That was the case. Interestingly, I would say there’s still a lot of continuity when we look at the genres across the period. So, you know, even though there is more propaganda also within entertainment programming, it’s definitely the case that the types of programs stay rather consistent and the attacks towards programs in the Weimar period in the early 30s from the right, it’s mainly racially motivated. 

So, it’s because there were a lot of left wing authors, people with Jewish backgrounds, but it’s also aesthetic. It’s really about there being an experimental aesthetic but associated with the Weimar period and that needs to be stopped and a culture called Völkisch in German. So folksy, programming needs to take place with more use of marching songs and anthems, but actually when those types of programs were instated in 1933 to roughly 1934/1935 they were highly unpopular. 

Until World War II, there’s a place given to militaristic songs in the context of public rallies and public events, commemorations. But in the kind of entertainment programs and news programs, there’s a little bit more of a sense that the propaganda has to be more finely tuned.

And I think that’s maybe also part of the cliche. It’s hard for us to imagine that there were a lot of light, entertainment and comedy programs on National Socialist Radio, but that’s actually what is often remembered if you have interviews with people. 

Mack Hagood: Oh wow. Even during the war?

Carolyn Birdsall: Absolutely

Mack Hagood: Yeah. I mean, I think the stereotype is Hitler using his outside voice instead of using the radio as an intimate medium, as in say the fireside chat, right?

Carolyn Birdsall: Absolutely.

Mack Hagood: It sounds like there were a lot of other types of programming and other ways to effectively appeal to people. Speaking of that, maybe, because I don’t think we quite nailed down that concept that I remember from the book, which is Affirmative Resonance. So now that we kind of understand radio programming in Nazi Germany, can you maybe talk a little bit about this concept that you developed?

Carolyn Birdsall: Sure. So, it’s a concept I adapted from a scholar whose name is Cornelia Epping Jaeger, and she was thinking about the role of the loudspeaker and the PA system in Nazi Germany, and she was really taking it from a media theoretical point of view, thinking about like what does the loudspeaker allow, what kinds of functions does it have, how is it developed and used during National Socialism?

And I guess I really want to take that more into an applied situation. And so with affirmative resonance, I was looking at the ways in which loudspeaker systems were being used in tandem with members of the crowds, participating in call and response, in singing, in shouting, in musical performance, the anthems being performed and sung.

And I was trying to think about the ways in which there’s sensory disciplining happening in these early years of National Socialism. Or even these first months of National Socialism. And how we know from reports that there’s a really a range of people who attend such events. People who are perhaps very motivated and involved in Nazi groups through to people who were partly intrigued or attracted to an event like this, to others who were passing through, or maybe just experienced the processions as they came to this site.

And so I found this concept of affirmative resonance to be really useful for thinking about this kind of sonic enfolding and participation of the people who are there, and who might not actually be actively participating in events. So they might not be singing, they may only be listening, but they’re experiencing the amplified volume and not only the affirmative resonance of confirming the power and the relevance of the national socialist party, but also the kind of effective nature of being exposed to a large volume of sound being produced by a huge crowd, I think some hundreds of thousands of people and its amplification.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, yeah, I really love that concept. And a friend of mine, Travis Bogan, and I have done some work on the role of fan noise, crowd noise in the National Football League. And the way that noise in that context is an affective resource that gets deployed. For example, it gets mic’d and put in the surround channels of the broadcast and this fan noise, this production of the audience. But it’s actually extremely valuable and something that the NFL monetizes.

Not only through television, but also through making the role of the crowd a part of the attraction of the event itself, that participatory engagement. What I really like about what you’re talking about with affirmative resonance is it’s capturing that dynamic, but also really thinking about it in terms of a kind of discipline.

We’re disciplining the senses to anticipate certain things, to enjoy certain things, to feel like I’m part of the group through sound. And that can be a really powerful political dynamic if we just look at something like a Trump rally. The joy of laughing at the elites together, of booing together. I mean it’s just a really powerful, effective resonance and resource that can be used for political purposes just as well as it can be used for commercial purposes.

Carolyn Birdsall: I would totally agree and I think it was interesting during the pandemic. I can’t speak for American football, but I know that in European soccer or football the absence of crowd sounds and noise was affecting gameplay. At least from anecdotal evidence, it seemed that the players themselves were suffering from the absence of that kind of volume of sound that they’re used to for better or for worse, but also in terms of the domestic television or screen experience, obviously a lot of people are watching some of those highlights with the sound off on smartphones and other digital devices.

But I think in terms of domestic television consumption, there’s a tendency to really put the volume up and for it to really enhance the experience of watching soccer matches. And so I found that to be a really interesting observation that at one point that I think they actually introduced canned audience sounds. I don’t know if they did that for the U. S. as well.

Mack Hagood: They did it extremely early on in the U. S. and in fact, Travis and I were planning to do a follow up article about that, but we just never really got around to it. Might be a little late now, but yeah. I don’t know if I want to think about the pandemic too much at this point.

Carolyn Birdsall: I think there is a tendency. For there to be a common agreement to not thematize the pandemic. And I knew that that was already the case in the commercial publishing industry. I read several articles about how publishers had not contracted any novels or other forms of books about the pandemic because there was a common understanding that the reading audience, whether it’s for fiction or for more scientific or academic books, that there is a real aversion to reflecting on the pandemic and that the general consensus is to try to not think about it as much as possible, even though obviously it’s not over and it still is affecting many people that there’s a real kind of sense in which people don’t want to dwell too much on the 2020-2021 period. 

Mack Hagood: Absolutely. I know I don’t want to. And then this is one of, you know, such an important lesson for cultural scholars. We need to attend to the silences just as much as to the noisier, more prevalent aspects of a culture, right? Like there, there’s a huge message in the lack of material that’s being generated about the pandemic.

[Distant siren noise]

Speaking of soundscapes, I’m listening to the quite different siren that you have over there. 

Carolyn Birdsall: Yeah, I live near a main road, so it’s funny. I did hear it, but I thought, “Oh, that’s just background”. 

Mack Hagood: Oh, no, I heard it loud and clear. I actually enjoyed it. Didn’t sound like a U.S. siren, so nice.

Well, now that we have you know, fully engaged with the rather dreadful topics of Nazism and the pandemic. Maybe we can turn to a happier topic, which is your recent book on the love of radio or what you call “radiophilia”. It’s an interesting thing to approach as a topic because it can mean many different things, right?

Like in one respect, radio is simply a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. We could also think of radio as a specific type of broadcast and reception technology, a radio. But we can also think of it as a social practice. So, you know, there are technologies that are literally radio that we don’t typically think of as radio.

So for example I teach a large class called the smartphone and society. Typically there’ll be like 120 students in the room and I’ll ask them, “How many of you are radio users?” And typically only one or two students will raise their hand. And then I kind of point out to them, “Well, actually there are smartphones, like all the data they’re getting is coming through radio” But we don’t think of that as radio.

And maybe that’s kind of pedantic, but it’s sort of a reminder that this is a social construction when we talk about radio. There are things that are literally radio that we don’t think of as radio, like TV. TV and smartphones are radio, but there are things that are, that aren’t literally radio that are arguably pretty much the same as listening to radio in terms of a social practice.

So things like audio live streaming or Pandora or maybe something like Twitter spaces. If that still exists, I don’t go on Twitter anymore.

Or what we’re doing right now, podcasting. Right? Like when you’re trying to tackle this rather nebulous topic of radiophilia, the love of radio, what was your specific object of study? How do you delimit what you’re really going to focus on? 

Carolyn Birdsall: Great. Thanks for this fantastic question. I completely agree. There’s a huge span of things that we might define as radio that are not considered radio and then the other way around. So I think the lesson of radio in general as an object of study. And I guess here I really follow the work of Kate Lacey and she argues that because radio has been so influential in everyday life, it’s become so normalized that we actually find it difficult to see it as connected to certain aspects of present day media culture.

So I think that’s something that perhaps the historian in me is enthusiastic about that argument because I do see a lot of commonalities and actually when we had the book launch for my book, I got a question about clubhouse and about the way in which certain forms of social audio and are actually doing similar things with shared experiences of live content that actually, you know, does have its roots in radio.

So I would absolutely say that like, that’s a really interesting dimension to radio that is part of its attraction for me is that it. It tells us something about the past 100 years and certain developments in the larger media landscape that help us think about certain developments in the present, even if they’re not acknowledged.

And I think particularly because a lot of colleagues working in media, don’t have that historical interest and as well as there’s a temptation to buy some of the presesentism of tech discourse. So I think that’s, that’s a real kind of motivation for me in thinking about a hundred years of radiophilia is not just thinking about a hundred years of radio from early wireless audio.

And regulated broadcasting through to the present and thinking about internet radio as well as forms of digital audio like podcasting. But, you know, I realized there are important differences. And so, you know, I obviously in the book talk about what is it about the networked listening experience?

And, you know, what other things are happening as people engage with digital audio content, you know, with smartphones or through platforms. So, you know, on the one hand, acknowledging certain commonalities in terms of shared listening experiences and perhaps even a discourse of radioness has been discussed in the literature while understanding that there are, you know, things happening with algorithms and platform logics that really are important.

Far beyond what we were seeing with the types of, let’s say, radio audience interactions and fan groupings and practices happening around analog radio previously. So, I think that’s something that I want to kind of hold both instead, in a way. Like, I want to see radiophilia as obviously connected to a history of the thing we generally think of as radio and its bifurcation into other similar forms of let’s say citational modes whether it’s like Last FM or a podcast network like iHeart Radio that that in a way it’s using the thing we think of as radio for the purposes of podcasting, as a new media form.

Mack Hagood: What were you trying to convey in choosing this term, radiophilia? So are there connotations of that term that made you choose it over say, oh, I’m studying radio audiences or I’m studying listening to radio or I’m studying radio fandoms? Why this particular term? 

Carolyn Birdsall: I mean, it is a new term, radiophilia, like the way I define it in the book is rather as an expansive concept.

So I’m really talking about a love for or a strong attachment to radio. And I guess, you know, I’m trying to say that there are multiple ontologies of radio. So, you know,  I’m arguing that the exact conditions, forms, or media assemblages may differ across time and space. And I guess what I see is the kind of added value of this concept is it does force us as scholars to think about radio’s effective appeal.

All the things you mentioned, I see them as components within this larger complex that radiophilia is encompassing. So, audiences, their listening practices, their engagement as users with a technological device. Also thinking about a wide spectrum of practices that are associated with an emotional attachment, if not fandom, to, you know, radio as a technology in terms of particular stations or content or stars or announcers that they’re, that they’re engaged with. 

So in a way, even though these are different aspects you mentioned. So, audiences, fans, listening practices, radio use. I see them as really important, but I don’t think any of those single terms encompass this kind of larger complex that I’m trying to tackle with the radiophilia concepts. 

Mack Hagood: And I really appreciate this wider perspective you’re bringing to the table here, because this is probably an unpopular opinion of mine, but as a media scholar though, I feel like one of the blind spots we might have in the worlds of media studies and popular music studies these days is an outsized emphasis on fandom. 

You know, all of us who are passionate enough to actually study popular culture for a living. We’re almost by default, like huge fans of something, right?

Like whether it’s a TV genre or like a cinematic universe, I hate that term, but a particular artist, you know, singer, whatever. I think the focus on fandom can create these lacunae of thinking about how people really use. Media because I think how most people spend most of their time engaging with media is not in a fan relationship.

And I know that the sort of Henry Jenkins and Aca-Fan stuff was meant to be a corrective to previous eras of scholarship that didn’t take fandom seriously enough and I totally get that and appreciate that. I think there’s a lot of important work done in fan studies and so forth, but I sort of just have an almost perverse, you know obstinate desire in my own scholarship to focus on media that people don’t have a fan relationship to, but still love, right?

Like media that are meant to be ignored or help you ignore other things. So with white noise, other kinds of sonic wallpaper. What I like about your radiophilia concept is that you write that the study of radiophilia is not just about superfans or radio files. It’s also about sort of ordinary, habitual, mundane everyday listening, which I think is really important to include 

Carolyn Birdsall: Thanks. It’s interesting to hear about your aversion to fan studies. I think it’s interesting having seen fan studies moved from a kind of peripheral subfield of media studies to such a central place it now has. And I think that that can sometimes mean that some of the earlier countercultural vibes that came with early fan studies literature can seem a bit bewildering now that it’s so central to the field.

If you go to a conference, there are so many panels on fan studies and fan practices. I see it as something that has its own blind spots the same way that any subfield has its blind spots. I think it’s interesting for me to be interested in what fan studies has to offer, but not necessarily be interested in the same objects of study.

So I see like there’s a lot of great work being done. And in the book, I’ve really found that certain approaches developed by Matt Hills or Nicole Lamericks when it comes to thinking about kind of the effective relationship that fans develop in relationship to their object of desire, I found it really helpful to think about certain different aspects to that relation to affect thinking about also about cultural practices around media objects.

Thinking about also where you position certain types of productivity or creativity. Are we more invested in the kind of fan creativity, which is self created, or do we also acknowledge merchandise that is industry generated?

So there are a lot of different things happening in fan studies that helped me. I think about the range of ways that people might be effectively engaged in radio and sort of generate material cultures around that effective relation. So I totally wouldn’t dismiss the field, but I do have a certain discomfort around its narratives of history.

So I definitely, in the book, try to challenge some of the historical genealogies of fandom that are really invested in the ways in which the thing we think of as fandom now comes from 1930s sci-fi fans of print media and how that paves the way for sci-fi fandom into film and television. Most obviously with Star Trek fans who develop conventions and a lot of the conventions of what we think of as fan practice.

So part of what I was trying to do is think about how radio, which is very much neglected, in the fan studies field to a lesser extent. And, you know, we do find music fandom studies, but often not historical music fandom studies. And so I was really trying to think like, would there be other genealogies of media fandom similar to radio that might shift us away from this very kind of limited sci-fi narrative?

And I found that there’s some amazing work that’s been done about theater fan scrapbooks. Early movie fan scrapbooks about teenage girls and the ways in which they gathered souvenirs and programs and produced forms of sociality and fandom around theater and later cinema. And that was really helpful for me to think about how like, oh, we have these other genealogies of media fandom that That just starting to be published now, many of them, and they don’t take us back to reasserting this one story about 1930s sci fi fandom as the early history of fandom.

So, in a way, it’s helpful to engage with the film, but I see blind spots. I also see a kind of a skewing towards male taste cultures which has obviously been challenged by feminist found studies about fitting but still I guess from a historical point of view. I still experience some of the objects of study as being quite particular and sometimes a bit narrow, I would say.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. And, I definitely appreciate the work on affect that has been done in fan studies and I do think that these kinds of profound attachments and creativity of audiences are all very important. I just think it’s the exception rather than the rule in terms of time spent engaging with media.

That’s the exception and it’s rather extraordinary how much time our fields spend focused on the exceptional rather than the mundane and the everyday. 

Carolyn Birdsall: I think that’s actually a sign that we’re real sound studies people because sound studies has often been interested in less popular and often problematic objects like music, or in the case of your own work, problematic power relations with noise cancellation headphones, or in my case, problematic uses of sound technology in highly politicized situations. 

So I think there’s something to be said that while sound studies has a strong relationship to popular music studies and is often interested in the popular. There is a sense, I would say, in the sound studies field that, you know, the interest in cultural politics or the politics of sound creates with it a certain suspicion. I think about Aca-Fandom, or like being an Aca-Fan, I can’t say which is better, but I do see that as kind of symptomatic of the certain interests of our field is to say like, well, yes, we should look at very distinct cultural objects and things happening around them.

But, you know, in sound studies, like, what’s the larger picture of the media landscape, or, you know, you know, the situation that, well, the discursive frameworks that this particular thing takes place in. And that does tend to make us a bit more suspicious. So I guess in a way, writing a book about radiophilia.

I partly gave in to an idea about positive affects and thinking about being kind of effectively boosted in relationship to different forms of sound on radio or kind of a broader concept of radio. But perhaps in that sense, I’m still the grumpy sound scholar who’s like, “Yes, but…” 

Mack Hagood: I’m not even sure that we need to pair the skepticism about fandom with a negative take on cultural products.

I mean, radio is just something that’s very elastic in terms of your attention to it. And it’s open to many different kinds of engagement. Some of it is very passive and disinterested, but also could be very positive, right? Like you can really love something without really examining it or remixing it or doing some kind of fan art with it.

Right. Like if I just think about what sort of purchase that I made most recently that I love the most, I got a new mattress.

I love this mattress. And I love it precisely because it doesn’t draw attention to itself. I went home to visit people in my hometown and I had to sleep on other people’s mattresses and I hated it because I had to pay attention to those mattresses and they were keeping me awake.

Like, I love my mattress precisely because I don’t have to pay attention to it at all. And yet it’s a powerful, effective relationship I have with that thing. Right. And I think we could say the same thing about something like. Lo-fi girl, right? Like the hip hop beats to study too. People can really love that.

And they’re never ever going to make any fan art about it. I’m sure somebody will. There’s probably somebody making fan art about a mattress, but again, that would be the exception and not the rule.

Carolyn Birdsall: No, I totally hear you. I think that’s part of the reason why I really want to include that insight from sound studies about the kind of wide spectrum of attention people pay to any given sound or object in their environment, which is, you know, that kind of really large spectrum between something that we might call focused or attentive or active listening through to the distracted, the less invested, the background.

I think that’s really where we see the kind of sound studies ethos, I would say in our thinking. Yeah, but it is a spectrum or it is a continuum and it’s, it’s dynamic and it changes and you know, even if I am super invested or I am a super fan of a particular show, that doesn’t mean that my kind of engagement, attention, affective relationship to it is stable.

Right. Doesn’t mean I’ll listen to the end. Something I actually came across after I finished the radiophilia book was a fantastic new study by a colleague called Caetlin Benson-Allott, and the title of the study is called The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television, and I guess because I teach in a television and cross-media team in my media studies department, you know, I am always thinking about like, oh, how does this relate to other things happening in the media landscape, and I just really loved her book because, well, she’s talking about how, say, drinking soft drinks or being drunk while watching television or, you know, eating food in your living room, you know, is framing your experience of media.

But she’s also talking about how consuming TV week from the 80s onwards as opposed to another program magazine, but because I’m not from the U.S. I’ve forgotten the title. 

Mack Hagood: TV Guide. 

Carolyn Birdsall: Yes, thank you. Yeah, the differences between TV Week and TV Guide and how they framed television viewing experience differently in the US context.

And, you know, thinking about these different aspects to the kind of material cultures of homes, but also consumer culture. Eating, drinking, as we engage with different forms of film and television. I mean, she’s particularly interested in living room settings of the eighties and nineties.

And I found it to be kind of both really inspiring, but also maybe quite validating to my own study, which, you know, is thinking about the different media that play into or boost or fuel what we might call radiophilia. So whether it’s fan magazines, program magazines, films in the cinema about radio, different forms of merchandise or creating personal collections or…

Mack Hagood: Radio museums

Carolyn Birdsall: Radio museums! Radio exhibitions. And so there are other people who are trying to develop this strong, in a way, intermedial and material cultural sensibility in relation to lived experiences of media. So I would say that would be my tip for any listeners who are interested. Or who have ever watched television drunk or want to understand what it means.

I would highly recommend her book. 

Mack Hagood: That sounds fantastic. And that is one thing I really admired about this most recent book of yours. This attention to the intermedial effects and the ways that radio might be the study object or radiophilia, but we have to talk about all of this other constellation of media and environments in order to understand the love of radio and what it’s doing.

I wanted to talk a little bit about another theme in the book, which is the way that radiophilia has been pathologized. And I was particularly intrigued by the early days. In fact, I wished you had maybe written a little bit more about this. But you mentioned radio fever or going radio crazy, which are these diagnoses that I wasn’t too familiar with.

So I would love to hear about these pathologies. 

Carolyn Birdsall: Yeah, sure. So I mean, it’s really quite striking across different contexts in the world. We see that, you know, also coming off earlier fears of new media, whether it’s a cinema or even before that. The train or modern photography, photographic culture.

We also see with radio, a real tendency to worry firstly about the amateur. So often the person who’s characterized as a young man or middle aged man who’s a radio enthusiast or hobbyist who in the 1910s, let’s say, is surfing the waves of the global ether trying to you know, listen out for often Morse code and later music and voice, but particularly in the early periods, Morse code and trying to pick up signals from other places in the world and often doing that in the attic room or somewhere removed from the family environment.

So we have a kind of fear articulator or cultural anxiety in, in this early period about. Those amateurs and they often even claim the term themselves, like I’m radio crazy like I’m a fan. So actually it’s interesting, like the idea of the word amateur as being love, you know, immediately this kind of fan word is claimed by the early amateur groups and individuals. 

And yeah, there’s a lot of anxiety about them being antisocial, removing themselves from the domestic situation, being distracted and being easily influenced. And what we actually see is as radio is domesticated, we have regulated radio in different countries and we start to have the idea of radio as a domestic technology in the living room or in some countries kind of in the kitchen or expanded kitchen environment with the family in the domestic hub.

That fear is actually transferred to women. So what we see in early, let’s say regulated radio broadcasting in the twenties is really, and even into the thirties in some contexts, is this idea that you might get a radio fever or you might be somehow afflicted by being obsessed with radio, by being distracted.

And in the context of women in the domestic setting, it’s often situated as not being able to apply oneself to one’s domestic duties. So, you know, it’s very much a gender discourse.

Mack Hagood: Oh, so the radio is getting in the way of the ironing? 

Carolyn Birdsall: Absolutely. That women would become too nervous, that they would become too distracted, they wouldn’t be able to apply themselves and focus on domestic duties.

Mack Hagood: That’s such a difference from the kind of flow that people often describe about say podcasts that enables them to wash the dishes or mow the lawn and kind of get through these mundane tasks and feel more engaged in a way. 

Carolyn Birdsall: Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, we also hear that discourse to this idea of radio as being like a background that lightens the day that makes the day go faster that, you know, it starts to be used in factories in the twenties and thirties and also in the context of World War Two.

So there is also that concept of like radio and the rhythms of the domestic environment. But a lot of the things that happened later in our own media environment, whether it is the transistor radio or the iPod, or the iPhone or gaming, digital gaming that you know, we see these same kinds of culture anxieties about distraction, isolation, aggression, children and violence, criminality.

We see different kinds of reversioning, I would say of very similar discourses and what would have been elsewhere called techno pathologies in other literature. So, I think that’s maybe also, like, I am very interested in radio and I’m interested in how across this 100 year period different things happen in the way that people relate to either the thing we call radio or the different devices used to consume.

So whether it’s a headphone. Based or headset based sets as opposed to loudspeaker based sets or the transistor or the Walkman like, you know, these different devices do structure our kind of notions of intimacy and connection at the same time There are these strange kind of discursive patterns that you know do repeat themselves I think it’s really helpful to have these insights from other media historians that we can kind of frame and place them better.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I feel very conflicted around this issue these days. I think I’m one of a number of people who was probably, you know, using the framing of moral panics around the media for quite some time, and I think it’s a really important insight. But at the same time, I think there are a number of scholars that I talk to, media scholars, who are sort of like, yeah, maybe some of those moral panics were actually pretty accurate.

And you know that our present day media environment truly is creating alienation and isolation in pretty profound ways and maybe encourages us to look back on some of those previous so called moral panics with a less jaundiced eye. I get the sense that scholars like Neil Postman are coming back into fashion.

I wanted to shift to maybe one last theme in the book, and I’m certainly leaving a lot out here, but folks folks can definitely get the book and dive in to get the full picture. But you also discuss these certain kinds of biases that have often suffused those the way we talk about radio and the way we study radio.

And so I was wondering if you could maybe talk about some examples of non-Western radio use. You mentioned earlier sort of like the masculine bias that tends to suffuse, you know, thinking about radio fandoms and so forth. So maybe from a feminist or non-Western perspective, are there any examples of radio use that are really different from what we typically imagine.

Carolyn Birdsall: Sure. So in the book, you know, I am calling for more global perspectives on radio research and it’s part of the research agenda I set up. I try to bring in examples where perhaps the domestic model of privatized radio consumption needs to be challenged because, you know, that radio is more of a public media, where transistor radios are carried into other environments.

I give the example from research about the Philippines that a lot of radio consumption historically happened at corner shops and in kind of tandem with local gossip and chatting with other people from your neighborhood so that there’s a kind of communal context of reception and interpretation.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, I love that. 

Carolyn Birdsall: And I think there’s also a really great contemporary work coming out, which comes back to the conversation we had earlier today about different expansive understandings of radio. We have a colleague whose name is Lori Kido Lopez. She’s published a bunch of articles, including one called mobile phones as participatory radio.

And she’s really interested in the way in which Hmong migrants in the US and you know, in their communities, whose producers and audiences often post what they call us, right? Like radio content, but it’s a form of teleconferencing. Using mobile phones and then often it’s posted as content onto YouTube.

And so she’s talking about, in these articles, about how there’s a form of sharing and informal archiving, but also a kind of shifting of the definition of what radio is. And I think that’s really helpful to understand that you know, that a form of teleconferencing with mobile phones could also be experienced by a group of listeners in a particular linguistic group, like the Hmong people she talks about in the US as mimicking the structures and relations that radio may have offered in a different context, more similar to community radio, but it’s, it’s happening with mobile phones and it’s being reposted and consumed again through YouTube.

So I think that’s like, there are some of the examples, like there are many more that I discuss in the book, which are just encouraging us to kind of maybe unlearn some of the historical narrations and assumptions about what the history of radio looks like, what radio is, and, and to really see that. In some countries, radio was established by newspaper barons, in other countries the newspapers tried to block radio news programming, so we have different kinds of assemblages happening, and it’s really important as part of a radio and sound studies agenda to kind of do some of the work that our colleagues have talked about as like a remapping of sound studies and kind of, you know, I wouldn’t quite say like always a decolonization, but just understanding how certain assumptions are sort of defaulting and also our citational practices.

So I think I mentioned to you before this book was largely written in the pandemic. So I wasn’t always able to do the same types of research that I had previously, but I really took that as an opportunity to read very widely. Really beyond my expertise, you know, different places, different time periods and to try to draw from some of the very exciting work that’s come out in radio podcast and sound studies that is expanding our understanding of what radio is, its audiences, the kind of practices that developed over this 100 year period of radio.

So I think that would be kind of, I would say the main agenda that I’m hoping that this radio affiliate book and this concept is advancing is. encouraging scholars and also the readers of the book to open their minds to the different types of ontologies of radios and the different, the kind of the differently formed notions of, of audience, of listener, of user that we sometimes take as too much of a given, I would say.

Mack Hagood: Oh, well, I think that invitation is a lovely place to end our conversation. You’ve been so generous with your time and your ideas. So thank you so much for talking to me. 

Carolyn Birdsall: Thank you, Mac. It’s been a pleasure.

Mack Hagood: So for our patrons, we end the show with our what’s good segment, where we ask our guests to recommend something good to Read, something good to listen to, and something good to do.

Carolyn, what do you have for us?

Carolyn Birdsall: Sure, so for something good to read, I have two non fiction books, so no fictional works today. I just started to read today a special series of the Resonance Journal. It’s titled, Militarized Ecologies: Auralities, Incorporations, Terrain. It’s edited by Alejandra Bronfman and Maria Edunes Azuazo.

They have a brilliant introduction that unpacks how sound militarism and ecologies relate to each other. And there’s also an interview conversation between Gasha Azounian and the sound producer and architect Mohamed Safa and I can’t recommend it enough. And maybe if I would be allowed to have a quick small plug, I’ve also just started to read Mckenzie Wark’s Raving.

Raving is an essay length book that visits the New York underground queer and trans rave scene and explores, in her words, trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital. You know, I haven’t finished it, so it’s still, like, I’m only halfway through. It’s a hundred pages, and it’s full of amazing ideas.

Yeah, embodied reflections. It has a glossary. It’s drawing on really different academic and other sources, it’s a beautiful piece of writing. I can’t recommend it highly enough. So that’s something good to read. And perhaps it will motivate people to also go dancing. And then for something good to listen to I’d like to recommend a website called www.radio.garden. It’s an online radio map launched in 2016 that allows the user to navigate a map of the globe and zoom into audio from thousands of local stations. And in doing so, as Adrian LaFrance wrote in the Atlantic, is that the interactive map lets you listen to the radio everywhere. So, you know, I’d say if you haven’t been before, it lets you go to the most isolated places outside of Alaska, it lets you zoom in on very dense cities with lots of different radio stations.

It’s a really interesting, sometimes unnerving experience of looking at the globe and spinning it around to tap into different real time live streams, internet radio.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, I love that app and a common complaint is that the internet is this vast network and yet it seems to keep us constrained in these little walled gardens these days and I just think that app is one of the best ways to break out. 

Carolyn Birdsall: Yeah. And the interesting thing. I just kind of looked up the latest information about it, and it turns out that it’s been subject to restrictions more recently. So the UK has stopped its UK users from listening to any stations outside of the UK.

That happened a few months ago, and also Turkey has banned radio garden from being accessed in the context of Turkish internet because they see it as an infringement of copyright. 

Mack Hagood: Wow. Well listen while you can. 

Carolyn Birdsall: Exactly. And then, yeah, for something good to do, I do realize that it might be too typical for a sound study scholar to recommend this, but I have a tip for what could be a sound or listening walk, but it could also be a logbook or take a more diary form.

And it’s really just a suggestion from the first page of Jonathan Stern’s sound studies reader from 2012. And on the very first page of that sound studies reader in the introduction, he says the following. We live in a world whose sonic texture is constantly transforming and has been for centuries. New, never before heard sounds like ringtones enter and leave everyday life in the course of a few years.

Then he says, Take a good listen around you for a few days and consider what others are hearing. How many of the sounds of everyday life existed 10 years ago, 20 or 30 years ago. So it’s just really a question, I guess at any point or, you know, whether, you know, you want to be more mobile or less mobile, just to, to kind of just take in your immediate environment and think about what’s distinctive.

I think you pointed out that the siren going past my window sounds really different. To what a siren would sound like where you live. And, you know, I’m sure if we had a soundscape recording from outside the same window 20 years ago, it’s quite possible it was a slightly different tone or a different sound that was used by the same service.

So yeah, maybe it’s like a typical sound history exercise, but I think it’s one that, you know, is really very much about thinking about the particular place and time that you’re in, in a given moment. How it might be characterized now, but also how it might relate to different moments of the past. And I think the example of the mobile phone ringtone is a really good one because you know, there was this kind of wave of personalized ringtones and really within two or three years.

It became very passé and not done to have, to have music or annoying yeah, annoying sounds as your ringtone or to even let, let your sound let the sound of your phone be on at all. So I’m actually someone who permanently has my phone on silent. So you know, I think I’m quite typical in that regard.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. That is such a good thing, that is already a historical moment. It is pretty amazing. Wonderful. Thank you for these suggestions. And, I do really think that listening in this way, doing a sort of sound observation meditation in terms of historicity is a great variation on that theme and one that I’m going to try out.

Carolyn Birdsall: Thank you. 

Mack Hagood: All right. Well, thanks so much.

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Today we share a podcast episode on the visual epistemology of astronomy by our friends at The World According to Sound. What kind of knowledge do we really gain when we look at images from space?

Longtime listeners to this show will remember The World According to Sound. As we referred to them two years ago, WATS is a team of two rogue audionauts who rebelled against the NPR mothership: Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. Tired of sound playing second fiddle to narrative on NPR, they launched a micro podcast that held one unique sound under the microscope for 90 seconds each episode. Later, WATS became much more ambitious, producing live sonic odysseys in 8-channel surround sound and live online sound journeys during the pandemic.

Since then, Harnett and Hoff have embarked on another project. For the past couple of years, they have been partnering with different universities to translate humanities research into compelling sound-designed narrative podcasts. The first season of Ways of Knowing was produced in partnership with the University of Washington and it focused on different analytical methods and disciplines in the humanities, from close reading, deconstruction, and translational analysis, to black studies, material culture, and disability studies. The second season just wrapped up. It’s called Cosmic Visions and it’s produced in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and that’s what we’ll hear an episode from today. Just this week, they dropped the last episode of season two and now the entire series is available on The World According to Sound website.

We wanted to draw your attention to this series because turning humanities research and sound art into a sonic narrative experience was the original mission of Phantom Power. We know that many of you are interested in this area of humanities podcasting as well, so if you’re not already a fan of Chris and Sam’s work, check it out. We also wanted to share this particular episode because it also provides one answer to a tricky question: How do you do a sonic explication of something that is entirely visual?

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Tinnitus can be annoying, for sure--and for some people it's much worse than annoying--but it also has a lot to say of interest, if we're willing to listen: "Tinnitus has been my guide in sound studies, my Virgil, leading me through a shadow world of sound. It's taught me how high the stakes can be when it comes to the perception and control of sound and it's given me new ways to think about how and why we use media devices." Continue reading →

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