Sounding Out!

Youth, Reverberations, and Detroit’s Most Charismatic Rapper

“Type in Sada Baby on the computer and let them hear the difference.”

Devante gives me this advice in the midst of an escalating back-and-forth among his peers about the difference between singing and rapping. Eighteen middle schoolers lounge around two picnic tables inside our local community center for this six-week summer program. We’re still in the first week, and each day they’ve name-checked Sada Baby, a charismatic rapper from the eastside of Detroit. I’m too occupied at the moment—trying to keep the conversation from spilling into an argument—to heed Devante’s advice, so he takes matters into his own voice. 

“Rapping is like this,” he tells the group while starting to nod his head to an ear-magined beat. “Oh boy, I ain’t playing no games!” Devante raps the first half-bar of “Oh Boy,” Sada Baby’s 2017 track that narrates his street exploits and threatens his rivals — often with violence to the women they might or might not love. Devante not only raps this opening line but approximates the grain of Sada Baby’s voice, at least as much as he can since his adolescent tone hasn’t yet caught up to his linebacker build. My own ear—from over 20 years as hip-hop DJ, turntablist, and vinyl enthusiast—is more Sadat X than Sada Baby. But Sada’s playful allure is audible even to me, like while bending his cadence into indecipherable sounds over the track’s intro. And he covered “Return of the Mack” into a shirtless gunplay revenge track. So there’s that, too. I can understand the affective draw he has on the young people in the room. And even if couldn’t, this wouldn’t be the last I would hear of him in Yaktown Sounds that summer.

Yaktown Sounds is an emergent space of sound making I curate in and around Pontiac, Michigan. (Pon-ti-Yak = Yaktown, get it?) A postindustrial city halfway between Detroit and Flint, Pontiac is the home of jazz drummer Elvin Jones, hip-hop group Binary Star, and perhaps the most respected battle rapper on the national scene today: JC. Since 2015, I’ve organized an evolving network of artists—usually DJs and beat makers—to make space for youth and community members to play with sound.  Of course, play and sound go well together. In Yaktown Sounds, sometimes it’s elementary-age youth at the public library hitting pads and twisting knobs on MIDI controllers until they like what they hear. Other times it’s daddies and daughters scratching a record under the needle to see what comes out. The summer of 2017, I lined up a different musical artist each week from Pontiac and Detroit to visit and share their skills.

A black man plays with a turntable, with his daughter in his lap

Photo at Yaktown Sounds by James Easterly

My curatory approach to this space takes inspiration from Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a creative, visionary, performative Black girlhood practice. In part, SOLHOT generates from a particular stance on Black girlhood sound. In Hear Our Truths (2013), SOLHOT visionary Ruth Nicole Brown theorizes Black girlhood sound and the ways it resists and improvises around neoliberal youth programming constraints that are intended to “fix” youth. Riffing off Tricia Rose in Black Noise, Brown theorizes Black girlhood as a sound nobody can organize. It bounces off adult listenings that would compress it into binary identity positions like sass/silence or into white mainstream notions of politeness and civility. What follows from this stance are not constrained, prescribed “learning environments” for youth but open, performative, imaginative spaces not always under adults’ control. This is the type of environment I try to facilitate in Yaktown Sounds. 

This stance toward space and environment means vulnerability to reverberations and their affects. Reverberation, of course, is a phenomenon and technique that plays a prominent role in Black diasporic sonic expression. As Michael E. Veal writes, its affect/effect is most pronounced through Jamaican dub music: the collisions among sounds through echo, delay, and reverb. Veal’s engagement with dub and reverberation is also conceptual. In Dub (2013), he considers its echoes and ruptures “a sonic metaphor for the condition of diaspora” (197). In Sound Curriculum (2018), Walter Gershon thinks with sound to make a similar argument for reverberation and other physical, metaphysical, and aural phenomena: “Because sounds are already in motion, they are always reverberating, bouncing off of objects from sinus cavities to walls to coral to brush to air to water to stone” (56). In these instances, Veal and Gershon take up reverberation in both aural and environmental settings. Yet these ideas also apply to the spaces where youth and adults co-create together. What collides, bounces, and stays in motion? What counts as a reverberation?

In that summer of Yaktown Sounds, I understand Sada Baby’s aural presence as a kind of reverberation. He stayed in motion, colliding with youth judgments about what counted as rap, how a rapper’s voice should sound, and even my own aspirations for the space. These collisions were most apparent while preparing each week for our visiting artist. 

Before a visit from Mahogany Jones, we watched the video for her song “Blue Collar Logic.” Landon was the first to respond while leaning back against the table, feet kicked out in front of him, and retwisting his short bronze locks:  

“Can we see another one? That one wasn’t good. I didn’t think it was good. Not as good as I thought it would be. It was too much of that, uh, old time. I just think she didn’t rap enough.”

For Landon, the standard for rapping enough and not sounding “old time” was—you guessed it—Sada Baby. “He actually raps,” Landon noted while explaining. If we consider music and song not only as art but as different organizations of sound (another point from Gershon), Landon has a point. To get specific, some of Sada Baby’s songs are continuous bars of rapping — no hooks, no chorus, no rest. In “Oh Boy,” Sada Baby raps for two minutes and 20 seconds of the song, and guest artist FMB DZ raps a 40 second verse. Straight bars over a trap beat. By comparison, “Blue Collar Logic” is also roughly 3-minutes long but has a fuller song structure. Mahogany Jones raps for 1 minute and 20 seconds across two verses. In the golden era template of DJ Premier, cuts from DJ Los make up the 30-second intro, the two choruses, and the instrumental outro that lasts approximately one minute. If we do the math, Sada Baby’s track has more than double the rapping compared to Mahogany’s.

My point here isn’t to judge which organization of sound is better; there is no wrong way to organize sound. Rather, these details illustrate two very different organizations and how Sada Baby’s made up the basis for Landon’s judgment. 

If Landon’s directness that “she didn’t rap enough” rings a bit harsh to our polite adult listenings, then hear Kareem slice through the group conversation after listening to hometown artist Kodac aka M80, who had just returned from a European tour: 

“He don’t know how to rap.” 

Kareem’s judgment was based upon what he heard as singing and rapping happening in the same song, an organization of sound he classified as “old.” When I asked Kareem what Kodac needed to do to be a better rapper — “in your opinion,” the recommendation was equally direct: “Be more like Sada Baby.” 

hands poised over a beats machine

Photo at Yaktown Sounds by Emery Petchauer

These responses from Landon and Kareem show us something else about the movement of reverberations through this space. Sada Baby’s aural presence not only collided with youth preferences and claims about rap. As a reverberation, he was used to berate other artists whose sounds and configurations of sound were heard as “old” through youths’ generationally tuned ears. 

Despite the youth-centric stance I take on spaces like Yaktown Sounds, I’m not gonna lie: the strikes and blows of these reverberations hit me too because of the relational ties I hold with these artists. They are part of my own creative community. I’ve DJed on stage for Kodac. I go to all of Mahogany’s shows. As a result, I remain vulnerable to the force of these reverberations. Owning up to that point, I am reminded of what Shakira Holt teaches us about adults and how we listen, particularly in education settings: sometimes we are not as open-eared to youth as we imagine ourselves to be — especially given the ways we have been socialized to censor and silence Black youth, even ones who live through our own cities, schools, and community centers. Though I’m two years removed from this particular iteration of Yaktown Sounds, Sada Baby continues to reverberate with/against me. He stays in motion even now, echoing through my writing as I toggle over to his Soundcloud page, press play on his songs, and wonder if I will hear something that makes me tune in differently to the young people around me. 

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Featured image: Screenshot from “Sada Baby–On Gang”

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Emery Marc Petchauer makes beats and DJs with kids in and around Pontiac, MI. A former high school English teacher, he works as an associate professor of English and Teacher Education at Michigan State University. His scholarship has addressed the aesthetic practices of hip-hop culture and their connections to teaching, learning, and living. He also studies the high stakes test educators must pass to become certified teachers. He is online at empetch.com and on Twitter at @emerypetchauer.

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Sounding Out!

Contemporary Television’s Construction of Sonic New Jersey

At the start of The Soprano’s sixth season, in the wake of being accidentally shot by his dementia-suffering uncle, New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano enters a coma-induced dreamstate in which he reimagines his life as a successful precision optics salesman. A show interested in Freudian psychology, The Sopranos is full of dream sequences, but this one stands out as the longest and most frustrating, as first-time viewers must watch as the hour-long plotline follows Tony’s convoluted dream while his family waits in agony at his hospital bedside. Within the dream sequence, Tony awakens to find himself at a sales conference, where he has mistakenly taken someone else’s briefcase, and he attempts to find its rightful owner. Despite the frustrating circumstances, Tony has lost his tough, mob boss demeanor: instead, he’s professional, polite, and patient, qualities that the former Tony rarely exhibits throughout the show’s six seasons.

Screenshot from YouTube video “The Sopranos – Join The Club /When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die 720p”

But what immediately strikes me about this dream sequence is the sudden loss of Tony’s thick Jersey accent. Gone is the fast-paced speech filled with dropped ‘r’s’ and long ‘a’s’ and ‘o’s’. Instead, Tony’s way of speaking is relatively accentless, aligning with what is considered a neutral North American accent. By dreaming of himself as an upwardly mobile, white-collar worker, Tony has not only imagined a new career, he’s also imagined a new way of speaking, one that lacks any clear markers of region, class, or ethnicity. This transformation ultimately tethers Tony’s New Jersey accent to his identity as an Italian American mobster with working-class roots, and it reinforces the idea that speech is indicative of one’s class. The dream sequence is one instance in which television constructs the New Jersey accent as signifying a certain brand of whiteness—not quite white trash, but perhaps one step above it, a form of whiteness lacking sophistication, riddled with ignorance and superficial wealth.

Here I examine contemporary television’s construction and performance of the Jersey accent in order to understand what it confers about class status and ethnic identity. As others have argued, New Jersey dialects are actually quite eclectic, though contemporary television tends to represent the state’s accent as defined by long vowels and quick, poorly articulated speech:

I’m interested in how television shows such as The Sopranos, Jersey Shore, and Real Housewives of New Jersey, among others, construct the Jersey accent as a homogenous indicator of ethnicity and social class. Within these predominantly white shows, the Jersey accent is associated with whiteness, situating characters at a distance from dialects susceptible to scrutiny and violence, such as nonwhite immigrant accents or who embody what Nina Sun Eidsheim calls sonic blackness, but it also signifies that these characters do not come from respectable backgrounds or generational wealth.

Screenshot from Season 1 Episode 1 of MTV’s Jersey Shore

New Jersey has served as a popular setting for contemporary television, and reality television in particular has capitalized on the state’s materialistic and ostentatious reputation. As Alisha Gaines argues, reality television has a “full-blown crush” on the state, as its geography serves as “a stage for class and social passing, a late capital playground of ethnic representation.” MTV’s Jersey Shore is the most well-known reality TV show to emerge out of New Jersey. Although only a few of the show’s main characters originate from the state, they all embrace a stereotypical Jersey aesthetic: the big hair, the tanned bodies, and yes, the accent. Like The Sopranos, Jersey Shore’s Italian American characters claim to have a complicated relationship to whiteness. The characters attempt to reclaim the derogatory term “guido” (or “guidette,” in the case of the show’s female characters) and admit to not fully identifying as white: “I’m not white,” the show’s Nicole Polizzi (Snooki) says at one point. “I’m tan. That’s what I am.”

In Episode 7 of the show’s first season, Snooki meets Keith, a man she’s surprised to have hit it off with not only because he’s not Italian, but also because “he talks like a cowboy.” Yet Keith does not have a Southern accent, as one might expect, but instead speaks in a standard North American accent. Snooki’s assertion that he speaks “like a cowboy,” then, points to not only how accents are perceived (in the eye of the beholder), it also centers and normalizes the characters’ Jersey accents and calls into question how American television audiences have been trained to experience and think about accented subjects.

Predictably, within New Jersey shows, accents and “improper” ways of speaking often become the butt of the joke. For instance, in The Sopranos episode “Cold Stones,” Tony gifts his wife Carmela a Louis Vuitton wallet containing thirty grand in cash. “This is the real Louis Vee-toon,” he assures her, butchering the pronunciation of the French designer’s name. Tony may be able to afford the “real thing” (and then some), but his inability to sonically perform it gives him away: this is not a lifestyle he inherited or was born into; it does not come natural to him.

In a similar vein, Bravo produces blooper reels of the New Jersey Real Housewives mispronouncing common words (skooers instead of skewers, lopter instead of lobster, bought instead of brought, for instance).

Here, these characters’ mispronunciations are intended to indicate their ignorance and lack of education, echoing the show’s hints that their female characters have mob affiliations and primarily live off their husbands’ money. Within the Real Housewives of New Jersey and other Jersey-based shows, commenting on the state’s accent often functions as a way of implying that their characters are not to be taken too seriously, thereby influencing how audiences perceive this way of speaking beyond these shows (see, for instance, this Reddit thread).

As it pertains to whiteness and class, the privilege that the Jersey accent does or does not confer is difficult to unpack. Scholars such as Jennifer Stoever and Shilpa Davé have shown how nonwhite accents are subject to surveillance and violence in ways that white accents are not. Similarly, Christie Zwahlen argues in her Sounding Out! post “Look Who’s Talking, Y’all” that “In contradistinction to ‘foreign’ sounding accents, Southern accents are a classic symbol of American cultural belonging, like apple pie for the ears.” But what version of whiteness, and more specifically, Americannes, does the Jersey accent connote? While within the shows examined here, the accent is spoken primarily by characters belonging to immigrant groups that have been encompassed within the category of whiteness (often Italian and Jewish Americans), the legitimacy of these characters’ social class and education level is often under scrutiny. These characters’ interest in flashy outfits, gold jewelry, and French Chateau style decor (you know it when you see it) is represented as trashy and artificial, a performance of wealth rather than the actual embodiment of it.

In many ways, the “improperness” of the Jersey accent becomes another way of indicating that these characters are not highly educated and therefore their words, thoughts, and even their wealth, are deserving of suspicion. And a show like The Sopranos, in which most characters have organized crime affiliations, confirms that this suspicion is well-warranted. Indeed, this is not the whiteness or social status assumed to accompany standard English or American accents.

“New Jersey” by Flickr user Doug Kerr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Unsurprisingly, these shows’ centering of middle-class whiteness and its sonic registers ignores the disparity that exists across New Jersey’s geographies. While the state is one of the nation’s wealthiest, it’s also home to poorer cities of color that continue to suffer from the effects of suburbanization and neoliberal urban development. For example, scholars such as Kevin Mumford and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas show how a city like Newark (a frequent setting on The Sopranos) has been heavily shaped by inequitable and volatile racial politics. And yet, the shows examined here eschew these socioeconomic and racial differences, erasing New Jersey’s communities of color from the state’s cultural discourses.

In an episode of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, set in Atlantic City during Prohibition, Irish immigrant Margaret Schroeder expresses her fear that her Irish accent makes her “sound like an immigrant,” to which city treasurer Nucky Thompson responds, “But we’re all immigrants, are we not?” While his response echoes the assimilationist myth of the U.S.-as-melting-pot, it hits on something precise about New Jersey: as the state with the third-largest immigrant population, the homogeneity of the region’s accent is largely a construct. While contemporary television presents audiences with an all-encompassing Jersey accent, in actuality, the state’s diversity makes it nearly impossible to pin down exactly what New Jersey “sounds like.” Examining New Jersey’s representations in popular television reveals how the accent has become one of the state’s most prominent and recognizable features, and shows how these representations have the potential to reductively categorize an entire population.

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Featured image: “Memorial Day Weekend” by Flickr user SurFeRGiRL30, CC-BY-2.0

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Shannon Mooney is a PhD student in English and American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her M.A. in English from the University of Connecticut in 2018. Shannon studies contemporary multi-ethnic U.S. literature, television, and film, with a focus on cultural geography and critical race theory. Her work examines how multi-ethnic writers and artists from New Jersey engage with the state’s natural and industrial landscapes to make sense of their positions as political and historical subjects. Shannon is also the Creative Director of Paperbark Literary Magazine, a publication rooted in sustainability and environmental justice.

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Sounding Out!

SO! Podcast #81: The Intimacy and Public Feeling of a Post-Troika Emotional Recovery

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD: SO! Podcast #81: The Intimacy and Public Feeling of a Post-Troika Emotional Recovery

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This week we are glad to share a podcast on intimacy and public feeling. Our host, Ana Pais looks at several performances which premiered in Portugal between 2017 and 2019:  Happy Show, by Miguel Pereira; Tristeza in English from Spanish, by Sónia Baptista; Cinderella, by Lígia Soares; and Every Brilliant Thing, by Ivo Canelas. Pais examines the social, cultural and political dimensions of public feeling (or public affect) as well as how they influence our everyday experience using the format of a radio broadcast.

Formulated by Lauren Berlant (2011), the concept public feeling defines public spheres as collectively generated and negotiated words of affect. The private sphere where we experience our emotions and feelings most intimately is conditioned and shaped by economic, political and cultural forces. They fuel desires and fantasies that circulate in cultural narratives. This podcast questions why the Portuguese artists listed above chose to pick happiness, sadness, depression and romantic love as topics for development in the current Portuguese political and social situation? How do these affects reflect, reinforce and subvert a post-Troika context with a Left Wing coalition government and a President of the Republic called–even before he took office–the “president of affection”?

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Featured image is of Miguel Pereira’s Happy Show. It is used with permission by the author.

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Ana Pais is a dramatuge, curator, and FCT Postdoctoral Fellow at CET – Centro de Estudos de Teatro at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon. She is currently undertaking the research project “Practices of Feeling” in which she approaches the affective dimensions of performance through embodied knowledge and sound knowledge. She is the author of Discourse of Complicité: Contemporary Dramaturgies (Colibri 2004), Affective Rhythms in the Performing Arts (Colibri 2018), and the editor of Performance na Esfera Pública (2017, Orfeu Negro) and its online version in English available at www.performativa.pt. From 2005 to 2010, she was an Assistant Professor at Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon). As a dramaturge, she has worked with theatre and dance professionals in Portugal (João Brites, Tiago Rodrigues, Rui Horta and Miguel Pereira). She curated, coordinated and produced various discursive practice events, such as: Indirecções Generativas – baldio (co-curation; Espaço do Tempo, 2013), Conversas Domésticas (Temps d’Images festival, 2013 and 2014), O Poder dos Afectos Lecture Series (Culturgest, February 2015), Dirty Ear Forum artistic residency (co-curated with Brandon LaBelle, Lisbon, 30thSeptember – 5th October), and Projecto P! Performance na Esfera Pública (Lisbon, 10-14th April 2017).
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Red Days: Popular Music & the English Counterculture 1965-1975

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Sounding Out!

Stir It Up: From Polyphony to Multivocality in A Brief History of Seven Killings

For many, the audiobook is a source of pleasure and distraction, a way to get through the To Read Pile while washing dishes or commuting. Audiobooks have a stealthy way of rendering invisible the labor of creating this aural experience: the writer, the narrator, the producer, the technology…here at Sounding Out! we want to render that labor visible and, moreover, think of the sound as a focus of analysis in itself.

Over the next few weeks, we will host several authors who will make all of us think differently about the audiobook selections on our phone, in our car, and in our radios. Last week we listened to a book that listens to Dublin, in a post by Shantam Goyal. Today we have seven narrators telling us the story of an assassination attempt on Bob Marley. What will the audiobook whisper to us that the book cannot speak?

—Managing Editor Liana Silva

Reviews of A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James’ 686-page rendering of the echoes of an assassination attempt on Bob Marley, almost invariably invoke the concept of polyphony to name its adroit use of multiple narrators. In The New York Times, Zachary Lazar maintained that the “polyphony and scope” of the 2014 novel made it much more than a saga of drug and gang violence stretching from 1970s Kingston to 1990s New York. And the Booker Prize, which James was the first Jamaican to win, similarly praised it as a “rich, polyphonic study,” with chief judge Michael Wood calling attention to the impressive “range of voices and registers, running from the patois of the street posse to The Book of Revelation.” It was thus not only the sheer number of voices in a preliminary three-page “Cast of Characters” that critics so unanimously admired but also the variety and nuance evident within them. Norwegian publisher Mime Books even took these polyphonic features a step further by hiring not one but twelve translators in a casting process that auditioned prominent novelists, playwrights, and performers.

Cover of the book, under fair use

James recalls realizing early on that this novel would be one “driven only by voice” (687), which might make such enthusiastic responses to its plurality of perspectives seem unsurprising. But what happens when such polyphony leaves the page behind and actual material voices drive its delivery? If the audiobook is a format of the novel (and here I follow Jonathan Sterne’s definition of format in MP3: The Meaning of a Format as “a whole range of decisions that affect the look, feel, experience, and workings of a medium” [7]), what lessons can listeners learn that print cannot provide? As I argue, the 26-hour-long audiobook version of A Brief History, which Highbridge Audio produced with seven actors (Robertson Dean, Cherise Boothe, Dwight Bacquie, Ryan Anderson, Johnathan McClain, Robert Younis, Thom Rivera), allows us to engage with multivocality rather than polyphony, which is to say the multiple vocal performances of a single individual rather than the presence of many narrators within a print work. And just as this novel’s polyphonic structure destabilizes any attempt at a definitive account of the events it portrays, the multifaceted performances of its audio format work to untrain ears that have been conditioned to hear necessary ties between voices and bodies. 

Of course, this effect is not one that most listeners consciously seek, as reviews of the audiobook articulating various reasons for turning to this format as well as diverging responses to it readily attest. Gayle, on Audible, began with the print version: “but as soon as I got to the first chapter that was written in Jamaican patois I knew that I was not able to do that in my head and I was going to miss a lot.” Sound here conveys sense more swiftly than the page, the ear apparently better suited than the eye to encounter difference. (Woodsy, another reviewer, even felt emboldened to ventriloquize in text that sonically distinctive speech: “I found that listening to the Audible version was helpful. Now all me need do is stop thinking in Jamaican.”) Yet it was Andre who offered by far the most memorable characterization of the audiobook and its affordances. As he explained, in James’ novel “the language is a thick, tropical forest of words. Audiobook is the machete that slices through this forest of words so I can enjoy the treasures inside.” The violence of this metaphor matches that of the novel’s most disturbing scenes, yet what is most striking is the way it reiterates once more how reviewers found it easier to access the work aurally rather than visually.

“Studio Microphone” by Richard Feliciano, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

These reviews, and other similarly favorable appraisals, rarely consider the audiobook on its own terms, insisting instead on comparisons with the text. Negative ones, however, often note distinctively sonic features, with some reviewers echoing one of the Booker judges—who reportedly consulted a Jamaican poet about the accuracy of James’ ear for dialogue—by questioning the veracity of the Jamaican accents in a novel that also features American, Colombian, and Cuban ones. Tending to readily identify themselves as Jamaican, these writers and listeners rarely acknowledge that at least some of the actors were born on the island when asserting that the accents are off. In any case, such efforts to link sound and authenticity, as Liana Silva has argued with respect to the audiobook, wrongly suggest that those who belong to a group must conform to a single sound. James, too, distrusts discourses of the authentic, as characters repeatedly cast suspicion and scorn on anyone uttering the phrase “real Jamaica.”

If the polyphony in James’ novel prevents any one perspective from becoming either representative or definitive, the audiobook pushes this process even further by demonstrating how a single performer’s voice can possess such range that it seems to contain multiple ones. Each performer is responsible for all the voices within the sections narrated by their primary characters, which means that the same character can occasionally be voiced by different actors. In one section, a performer does the voices of a tough-talking Chicago-born hitman and the jittery Colombians he speaks with in Miami; in others, that same performer is both a white Rolling Stone journalist from Minnesota who’s attuned to racial difference and the black Jamaicans he converses with in Kingston. Continuity or strict one-to-one correspondences between performer and character ultimately matter less than the displays of vocal difference that allow the audiobook to contest essentialized notions of voice.

As a result, the audiobook articulates just how constructed vocal divisions based on race, gender, and class are by having its performers constantly cross them. It amplifies the very arbitrariness of such divisions and thereby reveals how, if the page is the space of polyphony, then what the audiobook stages is multivocality. Although they might seem like synonyms, these two terms can actually help us appreciate crucial differences and, in doing so, highlight the specificity of the audio format. On the one hand, –phony or phōnē, as Shane Butler reminds us in The Ancient Phonograph, ambiguously refers to both voice and the human capacity for speech (36), whereas –vocality centers the voice. On the other, the shift from the Greek poly- to the Latin multi- signals a contrast in what gets counted: while polyphony names the quantity of perspectives contributing to a narrative (when introducing it in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Mikhail Bakhtin emphasized that polyphony consisted of “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses” [6]), multivocality instead specifies how the number of voices can exceed the number of performers. In this way, the concept of multivocality outlined here with respect to the audiobook resonates with its use in another context by Katherine Meizel, who mobilizes it with reference to singing and the borders of identity. In both cases, voice names a multiplicity of practices rather than an immutable or inevitable expression, which in turn aligns with Nina Sun Eidsheim’s argument in The Race of Sound about the voice being not singular but collective and not innate but cultural (9).

“Last Exit (Recording Studio)” by Flickr user Drew Ressler, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

We can therefore say that where print-based polyphony works on the eye by placing various perspectives on a page without necessarily challenging visual perceptions of difference, multivocality in the audiobook can retrain an ear’s culturally ingrained ideas about voice. James himself has experience with these seemingly inescapable meanings assigned to vocal sounds. In a moving essay for The New York Times Magazine, he recounts how, even at the age of 28, “I was so convinced that my voice outed me as a fag that I had stopped speaking to people I didn’t know.” That was already long after high school, when, as he remembered in a New Yorker profile, he had begun “tape-recording his efforts to sound masculine, repeating words like ‘bredren’ and ‘boss.’” He was well aware of the links that listeners created between voice and identity and that could, as he suggests, prove risky in a place with overt homophobia like Jamaica. Writing, however, offered him a space to take on any voice and, at the same time, not be concerned with the sound of his own.

Yet if the page allowed James to effortlessly shift among narrative voices, the audiobook format exhibits voices that ostensibly shift without any effort. Perhaps the most compelling example emerges in the work of Cherise Boothe, whose performance of the novel’s sole female primary character presents the voices of other figures as well. Toward the end of the novel, this character, Dorcas Palmer, is a caretaker for a much older and wealthier white man with amnesia in New York. Boothe not only captures the changes as Palmer often eliminates her Jamaican accent and occasionally lets it loose but also registers the man’s moments of lucidity and confusion. Even if, as listeners, we understand that Boothe is the voice behind both of these characters, the two vocal performances are so distinct that they effectively erode the basis for any beliefs about how a certain body should sound.

Adopting different voices is certainly not unique to the audiobook, but it does provide one of the few forms of extended exposure to this practice. Yet it is worth noting that A Brief History markedly differs from the model of a more extensive cast like the one comprised of 166 voices that recorded George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. By assigning a performer to every character, such productions ultimately emphasize vocal uniqueness in roughly the same way that Adriana Cavarero conceives it, namely as an index of individuality. But there the voice remains something singular or somehow essential, for there is no opportunity to perform the plurality that appears across A Brief History. At the same time, the use of seven actors also offers a contrast with the opposite extreme: a single performer responsible for all the roles, which demonstrates multivocality but does so on such a small scale that it feels exceptional instead of ordinary. The middle ground, which is to say the model found in A Brief History, allows us to hear multiple instances of how the voice is entrained rather than essential, possibility rather than inevitability.

Screenshot from Youtube video “Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings” by Chicago Humanities Festival

When briefly addressing audiobooks in an interview, James remarked that this format possesses a distinct advantage: “even something that is not necessarily plain can be translated because of tone and symbol and voice.” In other words, a voice can register its changing surroundings; conveying these subtle transformations on the page, however, is often far more difficult. This shortcoming is one that Edward Kamau Brathwaithe once memorably described when explaining why he insisted on using a tape recorder in a lecture on language in the Caribbean: “I want you to get the sound of it, rather than the sight of it.” The idiomatic familiarity of the first half, which clashes so sharply with the awkwardness of the second, suggests that the multivocality of an audiobook can open ears by accentuating how the voice is not fixed but in constant formation.

—

Featured Image: “Audiobook” by Flickr user ActuaLitte, CC-BY-SA-2.0

—

Sam Carter is a PhD Candidate in Romance Studies at Cornell University. His work on literature and sound in the Southern Cone has appeared in Latin American Textualities: History, Materiality, and Digital Media and is forthcoming in the Revista Hispánica Moderna.

—

tape reelREWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

SO! Reads: Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format–Aaron Trammell

Radio de Acción: Violent Circuits, Contentious Voices: Caribbean Radio Histories–Alejandra Bronfman

“Scenes of Subjection: Women’s Voices Narrating Black Death“–Julie Beth Napolin

INC

The Data Prevention Manifesto by the Plumbing Birds


The Data Prevention Manifesto by the Plumbing Birds

The privacy discourse sputtered out of steam. This has lead to the current stalemate: we know we’re observed, traced and tracked, but pretend it’s not happening or nothing to fret about. The question is not when the repressed will return but how? Hackers, have been proclaiming that privacy has been dead for decades, that everything can and will be captured, stored and analyzed. And they were right. What’s to be done?

What’s the best way to protect one’s self if not prevent to transmit data in the first place? Effectual hindrance of data coming into being. How to convene a collective dimension of “social networking” without being aggregated in huge data silos extraneous to us, yet profiting on us? 
How can we reclaim autonomy in our everyday life, knowing that there are all these sensors, bots and algorithms are still active? How can these technologies ever be decommissioned?  Are we perhaps waiting for a Great Showdown, a WorldWar, a millennial cyber attack that brings down the entire infrastructure, a bad solar flare or an electronic magnetic pulse knocks out the power grid and erase all hard drives? Or are we about to fall asleep and be mumbed forever, having accepted that everything we do, think and desire, can and will stored, and can be used against us?

We need to de-codify contestation in order to multiply the lines of flight outside of calculated settings. We need to ask the hard questions, too. Do Adblockers, filters, firewalls, close-reading of terms & conditions and online protests of the collection and reselling of private data merely mitigate the problems that are at stake. Or, and perhaps more to the point, what logic does data prevention participate in? Is it, effectively, the same logic it aims to cloak and hide from? Why do we think life can be informationalized? What desire feeds the notion that big data can be transformed into a knowable, manipulated, gamed, anticipated, preempted, capitalized and controlled life? Are we hedging and feeding Unicorns or Frankensteins?

We’re not talking about the weather. Let’s move from protection to the design of a serum. Do not feed the platforms. We’re proposing creative sabotage, concrete forms of prevention that undermine the ‘big data’ regime on all levels, from the molar to the molacular. Let’s take concrete steps towards an overall data reduction. We will no longer feed the data-hungry Minority Report machines that are programmed to identify emerging erratic behavior. Prevention sounds innocent, but make no mistake, it is not. In many cases prevention itself is already seen as a crime. Do we only talk about preventing events from happening, or are we also generating new scenarios? Data prevention is a direct response to top-down smart city technologies. We aim to uphold the preventive-strike (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preventive_war).

Data prevention is part of a longer history, from native Indian Americans being against having pictures of themselves taken as they will have their soul stolen to punks in the streets of London refusing to have pictures of them taken, back in the ’70s.

Ted Hughes once spoke of the grin hat was trying out faces. Well, that is real. In our case it is fear attempting to become integral. Fear is trying out all human capabilities. Fear can trick us into living a nudged and predictable life. This has come to pass as generation after generation corrupt, spineless, greedy people have been in the drivers seat. We cannot call it leadership. These people, let’s say Bilderberg, Fortune 500 and MBA globally have facilitated anything ‘easy’, outsourcing anything ‘hard’ to places that could be exploited. So now there is no more place to exploit.  Hence the fight for the internal space, the very notion of what it means to be human. If people can not be exploited and enslaved but would wake up already the shame some would feel of having been deceived for so long in what it means to be living, hmm hara kiri would be their only option.  Most of them cannot wake up as there is no longer a self to wake up to. They are zombies. No it is not a coincidence that we have them on our tv. The writers feel they are real. I, too, see them every day. They have been among us for quite some time. I just never thought there would be so many. And we so few.

Before we launch our campaign and gather the many ideas how to design products and services that do not gather data in the first place, it is important to say farewell to the premise that data is the oil of the 21st century. Not only is it questionable that data can and will be financialized, as if this were an inevitable next step that is programmed deep inside the data itself. We should also question the ‘mining’ aspect of the metaphor itself, as if digging up resources is not a devastating environment crime that ruins our planet, from tar sand mines to coal pits and digging for cobalt. Mining comes with a prize. We want to disassociate ourselves from the dark side of financialization of data. Mind the metaphors you use.

Along the same lines we need to get rid of the idea that data traces are things that we ‘leave behind’ in some careless way. It not only legitimates the drag net, but it diverts attention from the rather aggressive techniques that inspect our browsers, networks, and devices. We therefore need to reshape the possibilities of data production.
 This also means we need to stop drawing parallels between computation machines and the human brain, between data and grey matter.

If it is true that the machine only works when all the relevant people are convinced, we need to tell other tales. Convictions are not innocent; they are about re-making worlds. You invest in it.

Let’s stop celebrating the invisible, de-activation, retreat. Let’s quit the visualization of data centers, data points, data pattern, data collection and recognition algorithms. We’re tired of being smeared with how Big Data might smell, feel, look or sound. We do no longer want to play into the game or change its rules.

As Heidegger wrote somewhere, Hebel built the Almanic. When his contemporaries wrote the first novels and poetry of old, he invented this tacky genre of riddles for Tuesday, and a motto for April. And the weather? Well, the weather. In his short text on Hebel, Heidegger writes in 1957:  “We are roaming through a world that lacks a companion (friend of your home, huisvriend). Someone who understands and  appreciates  this technical global frame and the world as home for authentic living both equally strong and loving. We lack such a companion capable of accompanying the predictability and the technicality of nature to the open secret of a renewed experiential naturalness of nature. We lack that companion indeed. But we sense his arrival.”

Data prevention is not a strike, it is only perceived as sabotage by the apparatus needing to be fed by data. We do not believe in safe ways to deal with ‘big data’ that have been collected to monitor, and control, populations. What we prevent here is a conditioned, ultimately boring life that limits itself. Let’s get rid of the guilt to do the forbidden, and then feel the heavy presence of Big Brother, the all-seeing God that will remember every tiny move or bad thought. Let see it as consensual sex without consequences: data prevention creates space for pleasure and possibilities, it is not done to save precious space on our hard disks. Being in the space for possibility is breaking free from the dual pole of production (of data) and paranoia (for the same dynamic).

Let us err. Collectively.

We need to materially engage with the enigmatic, the flawed, the partial, the impure, the surprise, the transgressive, the black swan?

These days prevention is an offensive strategy that questions hidden power relations. It’s not just passive hiding but taking action. In WWII the Germans – in an attempt to confuse the Allied pilots – covered large areas with nets or painted wooden structures. One night one single RAF plane flew over the ‘village’ and dropped one wooden bomb. Let’s prevent this political tech design initiative from ending up in the offline Romanticism section. All actions, gestures, thoughts and movement can and will be captured and caught in the data trap. This can make us depressed, but this fate can also be turned upside down. There was and always will be an abundance of data. Let’s break free from the prospect to lock ourselves up in voluntary monasteries and other tribe-like inward looking social structures. There is no need to save data, let alone recycle them.

Data prevention makes a fresh start and leaves behind the tired discourse. The idea is no longer merely to filter, install blockers and build walls, protecting ultimately instable and open architectures. We create new design principles. Data prevention goes in the offensive. We’re tired having to protect ourselves. Join in this new design movement! Make people aware of what happens, and switch it off.

Engineers are taking us to real-time, thinking that it is an empty space. But we live there in dreamtime. We were ever caught by surprise in the plains. The rain dance went limp. Authorities caught us fishing, labelled aboriginals and slaughtered us filled our minds with cluttering noise and meaningless chatter chatter chatter. Counting on this we would lose the open line. This time this time we occupy that space with our tools and dreams as we live and we eat your tools and ‘logic’.

We, the Platform Plumbers, want you to tell us about your favorite things. Describe them any way you want. We record the richness of your emotions and feelings for your favourite things. We are getting used to doing with less. After all the sensors just measure light, motion, temperature, magnetic fields, gravity, humidity, moisture, vibration, pressure, electrical fields, sound, stretch, glucose level, oxygen level, or osmolality, anything else? Probably a few things but they you can do much better. Don’t you forget that. Practice. Start now and join us in shaping the Dionysian design genre.

Do not be afraid: we will work with you and your structures. We do need to appreciate the ethos of bureaucracy. All your assets, as you call them, belong to us to none no one. You my friend who is evil keep yourself evil still, the four horsemen and the jumper are hurrying down.

So it is up to us to make things find the hard road again. This is not a mass movement. It can only be done with those who are on the path already. If you are, read on. If you are not, don’t feel bad, there are plenty things left to do and who knows you may break through one day.

We will see you when you see us. You’ll see us when we see you.

The Platform Plumbers

(respect for Dowse http://dowse.eu and Fairsky http://fairsky.org)

—

Platform of the Plumbing Bird

Platform Plumbers 
we know what hides behind walls
and how to drill all the necessary holes
for good and bad
to fix, to change and maintain the pipes
to flood, disrupt, deny the waters.
Responsibility is not control
Awareness is a mercyfull weapon for the wise.
Is better to be aware today (brothers and sisters)
and awake at night as we must
standing for responsible data pregnancy,
and fair data under a fairer sky

Plato holds data (doxa) accountable of confusion and all wrong opinions
and Episteme he calls the field of the wise, that knows how to mark the land.
We don’t need faith into some theoretical dogma
We stay on the side of the platform
-on wich opinions falls as droplets-
and we sum up -upon us- the ability to collet these waters
knowing what to share, to store, to let go.
Because we are willing to use the source wisely
in the time of the drought
for humans, animals and woods alike
Because we share the point of view
of the whole ecosystemical bunch

Citizens!
Hold up to this notion of belonging
hold up to your refined data politeness
over their agendas of hidden data policies
and know what you can then well teach
to hold on before what you can only preach well

They say: money
money -without us- has no economical trust
we can better put trust into money that we bake ourselve up
and get on the path uphill
to “other ideas” that are good. Better.
Virtualised economies
fueled up by remote notions of debt
are obsolete by design,
and going to be worthless

Citizens, conspire to unfullfill the one way exploitation
to grow ecosystems of polite automatic conversations between pairs
instead of feeding motorised pushers of unwanted sleeping pills and snake oil
and  allow these drops to be clean water for all of the living souls on this plain

while we learn, and sleep and love, outside,
the un-attended trap of tracked down, data-silos stored,
overvalued, obviousness works against us
WE KNOW
we have no agency on the data, and we should
and WE KNOW
and the data is not the truth but her shadow, we know
to be used at will by self hypnotised puppetteers
to create fictions that does not compile into histories;
advertising for unwanted goods;
bed time stories for the lust of self loving politicians;
serving the one ideals of “the one percent”
We should have agency on data
because every shadow is a shadow of a body
hit by the light under the sun
we shall be close to these droplets and their sources
and the melting ice in spring
and say no thanks when we must
and please no when we feel is our right

We shall meet again (brothers and sisters)
on the verges of this gorgeous green land
once a desertified mud-bowl
each of us able to speek the language  of choice
to amuse the friends and make the childrens laugh
ad we will be called the platform plumbers
the designers of the garden’s grid
the layers of the pipes, of filters, of the recycling ponds
the choosers of the right seeds to keep
the letter-go of wild grasses and bees
-because no design holds the whole-
we will be remembered as the observers of the waves
the happy carvers of algorithmic stones
that needed to grow into no pyramidal graves

Let the policies of the politeness-poets speek tonight
in, above and below the grid

Sounding Out!

“Recorder of Dublin”: Ulysses’ FX in 1982

For many, the audiobook is a source of pleasure and distraction, a way to get through the To Read Pile while washing dishes or commuting. Audiobooks have a stealthy way of rendering invisible the labor of creating this aural experience: the writer, the narrator, the producer, the technology…here at Sounding Out! we want to render that labor visible and, moreover, think of the sound as a focus of analysis in itself.

Over the next few weeks, we will host several authors who will make all of us think differently about the audiobook selections on our phone, in our car, and in our radios. Today we start things off with a close listen of the 1982 audiobook edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Watch out for the hoooooooooooooonk of the SO! train pulling into the station!

—Managing Editor Liana Silva

To think about James Joyce’s Ulysses is to think about the first instant when it truly seized your ears. Accordingly, my Ulysses begins in its final episode, “Penelope”: Molly Bloom is lying down or sitting up next to a passed-out Leopold Bloom when she hears the “frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling.” Her train does not go chug, choo, or chuff, but it rhymes with her “Loves old sweeeetsonnnng” (1669) with an infectious insouciance for the codes of language. Let us call this the Ulysses of 1922 (though the definitive edition of James Joyce’s book whose page numbers are cited here was produced in 1984 by Hans Walter Gabler).

The Ulysses of 1922 is what Jacques Derrida called gramophonic. It plays back to us something recorded without filtering out the noise and is to be heard more than it is to be read. We listen to the book, but we are second-in-line. The first listener is the book itself, which listens to Dublin and records everything with an odd sonic democracy, discriminating little amid its recording of all sounds vivid or vapid, giving equal importance to cats, carts, bells, machines, laughter, coughs, and language. The book saunters about the city, listening and recording, and we listen to the book like we would to a scratchy, static-filled recording of a concert the morning-after. It is a reminder of something Michel Serres once said in The Five Senses: “Meaning trails this long comet tail behind it. A certain kind of æsthetics… take as their object this brilliant trail” (120). Ulysses’ elusive modern city glows in this comet tail of noise and background static more than it pivots around conventionally meaningful language content. Eventually, industrial and technological modernity catches up with artistic modernism and in 1924, Joyce reads and records parts of the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses, and later in 1929 he records a section of Finnegans Wake. Many years after, in 1982 – the centenary year of Joyce’s birth – Ulysses comes home to Dublin and is recorded in full by Irish national radio.

Ulysses 1982 broadcast CD cover, under fair use

The 1982 Ulysses Broadcast was an uninterrupted twenty-nine-and-a-half-hour reading of the entire unabridged text on Ireland’s RTÉ Radio on 16th June – Bloomsday – produced by Micheál Ó hAodha. Among this and the two film versions, one from 1967 and the other from 2003, and other recordings such as the ones by LibriVox volunteers and a more recent one by BBC Radio 4, the 1982 Ulysses Broadcast was the first complete recording of the text. Director William Styles called upon voice actors from the Radio Éireann Players to dramatize and act Ulysses out.

My Ulysses of 1982 seizes me differently from the book. From the first seconds of the 1982 Broadcast, I reacted to Buck Mulligan stepping down the stairs inside the Martello Tower with surprise, because the reading is somewhat copiously accompanied; the sounds of loud waves outside of the walls of the seaside tower were part of the soundscape I was thrown into:

Immersion was of the essence. Not that the Ulysses of 1922 is by any means a silent text, but this accompaniment was a simultaneous roar. Sounds in the written text take up space, and as these sounds are being “played” in the book, there is a length of text where nothing else is happening. Think, for instance, of the machinery in the “Aeolus” episode: “Almost human the way it sllt to call attention” (251). As the “sllt” is recorded by the book, it is not over or behind any other sound or voice. It takes up its own space, unlike in the Broadcast

The layering of Buck Mulligan’s voice over the sounds of the sea becomes possible in the move from the spatial-visual of the page to the temporal-aural of a recording. However, listening to the Broadcast prompts me to ask: Is the sonic democracy of recording the soundscape still there?

Most critical work on the audiobook focuses on readerly reception and pleasure, almost indicating that we can hear the Ulysses of 1922 but we must read the Broadcast of 1982; the book provides for more direct sensory engagement while with the Broadcast, we must focus on analyzing the mechanics of our reception. We also get terms like Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus’ “hear-reading” (179) or Matthew Rubery’s “ear contact” (72) which are concerned with the link between the playback of the recorded text and the reading ear. We hear-read when we listen to the voice in our heads recite aloud to us what we are reading, and we establish ear contact, much like eye contact, when we find our ears bound to voices instead of people. Both these concepts are concerned with reception. If we steer clear of our listening of the Broadcast and turn the focus to the Broadcast’s listening of Ulysses, what we find is a rich sonic world, but it is one which takes us away from the linguistic play of the text.

For instance, the book gives cues for the ambient sounds of Dublin clamor surrounding any voice which might be speaking at that moment. “Stream of life” (327) signals in the Broadcast the coming alive of the city soundscape. What is described as a “sudden screech of laughter” (255) in the book is layered upon loud laughter in the Broadcast, as is “a loud cough” (281) upon a loud cough, and a telephone which “whirred” (283) upon the sound of an actual ringing telephone. Later, in the “Circe” episode, a mention of whistling (1169) is also whistled out.

Trams, the clatter of plates and glasses, desks being rapped, coins and bells ringing and jingling, cannon-firing, all these sounds are played as accompaniments again and again as their descriptions are being voiced in the Broadcast. Like in bedtime storytelling, says Brigette Ouvry-Vial, sound effects as uncomplicated accompaniments are never in conflict with the voiced text. Think of pictures and illustrations alongside words in children’s literature (185). The background sound effects of the broadcast add nothing to the sonic democracy of the book even if they do not detract from it.

The Ulysses of 1922 is also rife with non-lexical, unpronounceable sounds, like the one’s Bloom’s cat makes. The many different cat sounds, for example “Mkgnao!” and “Mrkgnao!” and “Mrkrgnao!” (107-8), are not voiced at all in the broadcast, and are instead replaced by the mimicked sounds of a cat meowing, almost exactly the same each time:

“Miaow!” (133) and “Prr” (107), which are Bloom’s responses to his cat, are voiced by him. When the “door of Ruttledge’s office whispered: ee: cree” (243), there is no voicing – only the sound of a creaking door. Yet, when we are in Bloom’s thoughts, like when he remembers a glorious gust of wind which blew up Molly’s skirt, he voices the gust of wind in the Broadcast going “Brrfoo!” (329), pronouncing the non-lexical word with a close-approximation. Would not the non-lexical sounds in his head suggest that he is thinking in sound rather than in language, much like many of us who can hear sounds in our heads? Often but not always, environmental sounds are retained as actual sounds while the sounds in Bloom’s head are sublimated into pronounceable, phonetic language. But mostly there is an insistence on adding sound effects wherever possible.

“JAMES JOYCE [ST. STEPHEN’S GREEN] REF-1085622” by Flickr user William Murphy, CC BY-SA 2.0

Whether the book describes the sound or sounds it with a non-lexical string of words, the Broadcast attaches its effects. If we look at the book as a recorder, its movements are staggeringly complex as it moves in and out of multiple spaces. When it is in Bloom’s head, the environment is muted, and when it is inside a carriage, unless it is poked out an open window, it does not record the street. Ssave for a few instances, the Broadcast’s insistence on effects attests to its rich production, but not to its vitality. It therefore stands as an accompaniment to the book, not as a text in its own right given its compositional inconsistencies. So, the several variations on Bloom’s flatulence with “Rrrrrr” (625), “Fff. Oo. Rrpr,” and “Pprrpffrrppfff” are all erased and instead fart sounds are recorded.

On the same page, when Bloom tries to mask his own sounds of bodily release under the din of the passing tram, the “Krandlkrakran” (629) is both voiced by Bloom and recorded as the sound of a noisily ringing tram in the background. But only an actual train whistles in “Penelope,” with no voice in the Broadcast attempting to say “frseeeeeeeefronnnng” (1669).

For Charles Bernstein, the sound of a work of literature, much like the shape of poetry on the page, might be an element which is “extralexical but… not extrasemantic” (5). It is different from the written word but it is not a meaningless ornament. For the Broadcast, however, it might as well be the case that sound is made irrelevant to meaning. Or, we can argue that the meaning being made is in the realm of performance studies and not literature. The pure temporality of the Broadcast helps. We can stop reading the book to look, but we cannot stop the Broadcast and still listen. Moreover, when the Broadcast records, it is listening to the book’s listening of Dublin, removed by another degree from the soundscape of Dublin.

The Broadcast is not however without value. Bernstein echoes Serres when he aggrandizes the “sheer noise of language” (22) which must take precedence over the impulse to decode everything. The Broadcast answers this need to not immediately rationalize and sublimate in analysis everything that is heard, but to rather hear without listening. Cue the poet Robert Carleton Brown who once said that writing since the very beginning has been “bottled up” inside of books (23). And in 1982, the stopper on Joyce’s spuming prose was popped.

—

Featured Image: “telemachus: the tower, 8 a.m., theology, white/gold, heir, narrative (young)” by Flickr user brad lindert, CC-BY-2.0

—

Shantam Goyal studies English Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo for his PhD. He completed his M.Phil in 2018 from the University of Delhi with a dissertation titled “Listen Ulysses: Joyce and Sound.” He hopes to continue this thread for his doctoral research on Finnegans Wake and mishearing. Besides Joyce Studies and Sound Studies, he works on Poetics and Jazz Studies, and is also attempting to translate parts of Ulysses into Hindi as a personal project. His reviews, articles, and creative work have appeared in The Print, The Hindu Business Line, Vayavya, ColdNoon, Daath Voyage, and Café Dissensus among other publications. He prefers that any appellations for him such as academic, poet, or person be prefaced with “Delhi-based.”

—

tape reelREWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

This Is How You Listen: Reading Critically Junot Diaz’s Audiobook-Liana Silva

“‘HOW YOU SOUND??’: The Poet’s Voice, Aura, and the Challenge of Listening to Poetry”-John Hyland

“This Is Not A Sound”: The Treachery Of Sound in Comic Books-Osvaldo Oyola

Janneke Adema

Enseigner les objets complexes en interdisciplinarité. Approches novatrices

Sous la direction de Sivane Hirsch et Audrey Groleau, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

Pour accéder au livre en version html, cliquez ici.
Pour télécharger le PDF sur Zenodo : à venir
Pour commander le livre en version imprimée, cliquez sur le bouton Paypal ci-dessous.

Acheter un livre, c’est nous soutenir et permettre à ceux et celles qui ne peuvent l’acheter de le lire en libre accès.

Comment enseigner les objets complexes en classe? Utiliser l’interdisciplinarité permettrait de les aborder de façon globale et approfondie en faisant dialoguer une pluralité de points de vue et d’expertises à leur sujet. Mais comment faire? Quelle approche pédagogique choisir pour réaliser l’interdisciplinarité en classe? Cet ouvrage collectif, né d’un cours de didactique à l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, présente plusieurs approches novatrices, du préscolaire à l’université et dans diverses disciplines. Les chapitres décrivent les défis à la fois pratiques et épistémologiques associés à chaque approche, dans l’espoir d’encourager les enseignants et les enseignantes à les adopter avec enthousiasme.

ISBN version imprimée : 978-2-924661-35-2
ISBN ePub : 978-2-924661-36-9
DOI :
139 pages
Couverture réalisée par Kate McDonnell, illustration de etiamos@123rf
Date de publication : décembre 2019

Table des matières

Les autrices et auteurs

Remerciements

Introduction

הקדמה

1. Enseigner la consommation responsable en milieu scolaire… et pourquoi pas?

2. Les légendes, l’apprentissage d’une langue étrangère et l’interdisciplinarité

3. Favoriser l’interdisciplinarité et l’abord d’objets complexes en classe par une approche subjective de la spectature

4. L’approche par problème, une porte ouverte à l’interdisciplinarité

5. L’approche culturelle de l’enseignement : une passerelle entre culture et interdisciplinarité

6. La littérature jeunesse, porte d’entrée de l’interdisciplinarité

7. Conceptualiser un objet scolaire interdisciplinaire grâce à la controverse constructive

8. Entre image et interdisciplinarité : l’analyse iconographique comme approche pédagogique interdisciplinaire

9. Les protocoles de verbalisation interdisciplinaires en traduction

10. La dissection interdisciplinaire

11. Enseigner l’histoire de l’Holocauste

12. L’approche par compétences en classe d’histoire et l’enseignement de l’intégration nationale au Cameroun : une approche novatrice

13. Quand l’interdisciplinarité s’invite dans l’enseignement non formel

14. Guide de soutien aux enseignantes et enseignants de l’éducation préscolaire

À propos de la maison d’édition

Version papier ou ePub



Sounding Out!

SO! Amplifies: Marginalized Sound—Radio for All

SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig.  You’re welcome!
—

Marginalized Sound is an online radio station that will launch in late 2020. The mission of the station is to provide a 24/7 platform for underrepresented sound artists to broadcast their work. Marginalized Sound will host music hours with varying genres, poetry readings, live event broadcasts, and special programs such as “Mental Health and the Artistic Process” (see audio sample below).

The station plans to interview coding musicians, poets, singer/songwriters, and composers from across the globe, as well as commission new works with pending grants. Sound art here is defined quite broadly and the station is very excited to uncover what this means to different people. For now, the breadth of work to be played includes sound plays from the 60s as well as contemporary, Congolese rap (see sample below).

Marginalized Sound will indulge a space outside of whiteness. By using the internet to broadcast to the globe, the station endeavors to reclaim space for underrepresented folk. J Diaz, founder, states, “What I’ve never understood is that diversity is a choice and as a society we continue to choose whiteness.” It is because of this that Marginalized Sound will unapologetically and enthusiastically support underrepresented people only (interested collaborators please click here for the form).

In the coming years, J Diaz hopes to turn this into a full-time job instead of just a hobby. He sees potential for the station to provide paid internships in audio and marketing, collaborations with local and international organizations or festivals, and collaborations with university courses.

The online station is raising funds to pay for initial filing fees to become a non-profit business. Please donate here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ean89c-becoming-a-nonprofit. Other ways to help are to like the facebook page (www.facebook.com/marginalizedsound) and share it with three friends.

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Featured image: logo for Marginalized Sounds 

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J Diaz is a Sound Artist currently based in Philadelphia, PA. He designs sound for a variety of mediums—including theatre, dance, and the concert stage. Over the past few years, J has collaborated on numerous projects with theatre and dance companies located across the continental United States and has even worked internationally. J holds a Bachelor of Musical Arts in piano from DePauw University (’13). He studied piano with Dr Phang and composition with Veronica Pejril and Dr Perkins. He holds an MFA in electroacoustic composition from the Vermont College of Fine Arts (’17) where he studied with Dr Mallia, Dr Early, and Dr Holland. In fall of 2018, J completed an MA in composition with distinction at The University of Sheffield under the supervision of Dr Ker.

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My body, my traitor: essay in 10TAL

Last year Swedish magazine 10TAL published an essay of mine about data mining, the body, and self-knowledge. Now, the English translation has been published too! Read the opening below or click through to the whole text: My body, my traitor

 

We’ve come a long way, baby. From »On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog«, to »On the internet everybody knows I’m a top dog«, to »On the internet we’re all Pavlov’s dogs«. Or: from the homepage, to the social media identity, to the algorithmic profile. From the nerd, to the networked self, to the passive data goldmine (via the influencer).

This evolution can be read as a story of increasing corporality, as counterintuitive as that may seem. Usually, the story is told as if the world and its inhabitants are on their way to shedding all bodily weight, with the end-point on the horizon being a purely computerized humankind, all Mind and no Matter. But the inextricable entanglement of »online« and »offline«, »virtual« and »real«, primarily means that technology is all the time effecting the body (and thus, via the body, the soul). Like Pavlov’s dog, the post-digital condition is no »cloud« in which everything evaporates (and, as we know, what is called the cloud is a very material infrastructure that is using up as much energy as a small country, relying on cables that land on contested shores, demanding ever more precious metals to be mined from unstable regions). Rather, our bodies and the data that can be mined from them, function as the pathways to understanding, predicting and thus controlling or manipulating the world, which in the same gesture means understanding, predicting and thus controlling or manipulating the body, the very body that was mined in the first place.

In a catch-22 situation, you’re always made an accomplice to your own submission.

Continue reading over at 10TAL: My body, my traitor