Since mid-March 2020 most people across the world have been adhering to protocols of social distancing and self-isolation due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. In this episode, co-producers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod explore how our contexts and practices of listening to voice, signals, noise, and silence have changed during the first weeks of the public health emergency of COVID-19. How are we listening to the world around us, and to each other, now? How are we listening to poetry readings now? And what does our choice of what we are listening to tell us about how we are feeling? As Katherine and Jason explore these questions together – in recorded, remote conversations – they notice that our shared experience of social isolation seems to have us craving the comforting sounds of noise around the signal.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Jason Camlot’s critical works include Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford 2019), Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic (Routledge 2008), and the co-edited collections, CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Katherine McLeod, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019) and Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (Véhicule 2007). He is also the author of four collections of poetry, Attention All Typewriters, The Animal Library, The Debaucher, and What the World Said. He is the principal investigator and director of The SpokenWeb. He is Professor of English and Tier I Concordia University Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia U in Montreal.
Katherine McLeod researches Canadian literature through sound, performance, and archives. She has co-edited CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Jason Camlot, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019). Currently, she is writing a monograph on archival recordings of women poets reading on CBC Radio. She began this research as a SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellow (TransCanada Institute, U of Guelph) and then as a SpokenWeb Postdoctoral Fellow (Concordia). She received her doctorate from the University of Toronto. Katherine explores the intersection of dance and poetry in her own creative practice, along with curating SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Week, the Audio of the Month for The SpokenWeb Podcast, and Where Poets Read, a listing of Montreal poetry readings.
Interviewees and Voices Heard:
Oana Avasilichioaei, Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, Arjun Basu, Naomi Charron, Alexei Perry Cox, Nisha Coleman, Klara du Plessis, Ian Ferrier , Priscilla Joly, Rob McLennan, Heather Pepper, Lindsay Presswell, Deanna Radford, Kian Vaziri-Tehrani, Brian Vass, Isabella Wang, Alvaro Echánove, Marlene Oeffinger
Print References
Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Labelle, Brandon. "Auditory Relations." In Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York: Continuum, ix-xvi.
Peters, John Durham. Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999
Petriglieri, Gianpiero. Twitter Post. April 3, 2020, 7:43 PM. https://twitter.com/gpetriglieri/status/1246221849018720256
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994.
"Sounds from the global Covid-19 lockdown." Cities and Memory. https://citiesandmemory.com/covid19-sounds/
Poetry Recordings
Antin, David. "The Principle of Fit, II" (Part I). 26.:32. June 1980. Recording at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. PennSound. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Antin/Antin-David_The-Principle-of-Fit-II-Side-A_DC_06-80.mp3
Cox, Alexei Perry. Poems from Finding Places to Make Places. 42:39. The Words & Music Show, March 22, 2020.
Coleman, Nisha. "The Church of Harvey Christ." 40:53. The Words & Music Show, March, 22 2020.
Plath, Sylvia. "Daddy." Originally released on The Poet Speaks, Record 5, Argo, 1965. YouTube audio. 3:56. Posted December 29, 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM
--
Find a list of Ambient Sounds, Music and Additional Recordings used in this episode Linked Here.
00:00:06
Theme Music:
[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don't know how much projection to do.
00:00:18
Hannah McGregor:
What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor and each month I'll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. From quieted city streets once filled with the hum of commuter traffic to seven o'clock cheers for essential workers to compressed audio on your latest Zoom call, the soundscape around us is changing. Since mid-March 2020 most people across the world have been adhering to protocols of social distancing and self-isolation due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. We are living a historical period of major global and local disruption to work, social life, home life, and major new parameters around what we can do, who we can see, what we can hear, and how we listen. This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we invite you to listen in close to the changing soundscape that connects us all.
00:01:37
Hannah McGregor:
We join episode co-producers Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod as they explore how our context and practices of listening to voice, signals, noise, and silence have changed during the first weeks of the public health emergency of COVID-19. With work meetings, in-person poetry performances, dinner parties, and more moving online, our shared experience of social isolation seems to have us craving the comforting sounds of noise around the signal. It has us asking: how are we listening to the world around us and to each other, now? How are we listening to poetry readings, now? And what does our choice of what we are listening to tell us about how we are feeling? To explore these questions together, here are Katherine and Jason with episode eight of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “How are we listening, now? Signal, Noise, Silence.” [Theme Music]
00:02:39
Oana Avasilichioaei:
Can you hear me?
00:02:40
Klara du Plessis:
Yes.
00:02:41
Oana Avasilichioaei:
Alright.
00:02:43
Audio Recording:
[Sound Effect: Zoom Teleconferencing Chimes] [Audio, a robotic voice.] To normal. To normal. To normal. Public health. [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano] [Past Recordings Played One After Another]
00:02:45
Jason Camlot:
Uh...
00:02:49
Oana Avasilichioaei:
Hello.
Klara du Plessis:
00:02:49
Jason Camlot:
Should be able to hear you...Oh. I think I have it on.
00:02:54
Audio Recording of Justin Trudeau:
Stay home as much as possible.
00:02:56
Oana Avasilichioaei:
So Klara says she can hear me.
00:02:58
Jason Camlot:
Yeah, I can hear you.
00:02:59
Oana Avasilichioaei:
Okay, good.
00:03:00
Audio Recording of Justin Trudeau:
Stay home. Keep at least two metres from each other.
00:03:04
Alexei Perry Cox:
[Baby cooing in the background] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality, perfect incongruence, would get through to humankind.
00:03:12
Isabella Wang:
Oh my gosh, you read one of my favourite poems.
00:03:14
Katherine McLeod:
Yeah, I'm just going to pause 'cause my internet just said something about, I think we got a little off sync -- [End Music: Instrumental Piano]
00:03:19
Jason Camlot :
[Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental] Yeah, you just froze, you just froze there ... [Overlapping Voices]
00:03:19
Audio Recording of Justin Trudeau:
From each other. From each other. Stay home from each other.
00:03:26
Klara du Plessis:
But what I've been noticing is that I don't wanna be listening to things and I've been feeling mostly overwhelmed.
00:03:26
Deanna Radford:
There we go. Can you hear me?
00:03:45
Naomi Charron:
[Glasses Clinking] I love tarte tatin. I love tarte tatin.
00:03:45
Heather Pepper:
We're gonna do it tomorrow. No, tonight!
00:03:45
Various Voices:
[Overlapping, Distorted and Breaking Up] Is it almost bedtime? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Where'd they go? There was a certain fit. [End Music: Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental] [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano]
A kind of adjusted togetherness.
Audio Recording of David Antin:
Various Voices:
Jason s frozen. Side by side. Side side side. ...For me, hearing voice has really been more important, in this moment. [End Music: Instrumental Piano]
00:04:14
Jason Camlot:
Thursday, March the 12th: that was the last time that I had an in-person conversation in close proximity with someone other than my wife or two teenage children or one of our two little dogs. That was my last 40-plus weight training class. It was sparsely attended, but still there were eight of us there plus our instructor, Lisa Marie. We elbow-pumped instead of high-fiving when the workout was done. We already knew we had to be careful. The next day, the Quebec government adopted an order of council declaring a health emergency throughout the province due to the COVID-19 pandemic and, like millions of people across the globe, we've been in a substantial lockdown, at home, ever since. Major global and local disruption to work, social life, home life, and major new parameters around what we can do, who we can see, what we hear. Among the many disruptions, much of my and everyone else's daily communication has moved online. Our 40-plus weight training instructor, Lisa Marie, adapted quickly, started a YouTube channel, and has been posting daily workouts every day.
00:05:22
Audio Recording:
[Audio, from Lisa Marie's workout video] Hello again. So this is going to be day one of the home workout.
00:05:26
Jason Camlot:
Concordia University where I work mobilized pretty quickly with efforts to support all faculty members so that we can complete the teaching of our courses online using Moodle chat rooms and Zoom teleconferencing software. It was during the week of March 16th, the first week that the university shut down as I was preparing to move my literature and sound studies graduate seminar online with a class on the poet David Antin, that I began to talk through FaceTime and Zoom with my colleague Katherine McLeod--
00:05:57
Katherine McLeod:
Hi, it's Katherine here.
00:05:58
Jason Camlot:
--on what we were experiencing and what it meant for how we are listening now.
00:06:09
Music:
[Dreamy Instrumental]
00:06:10
Katherine McLeod:
My own thinking about questions of how we are listening now came from noticing that some of the poetry reading events that had been scheduled for the spring were starting to move online in different ways. Since 2016, I've been publishing a weekly listing of mostly Montreal literary events and readings called Where Poets Read. The last event listed in Where Poets Read that took place in person was on March 9th. It was Épiques Voices, a bilingual poetry reading, an event that I actually co-hosted myself with Catherine Cormier-Larose and little did we know that it would be the last one for a while. After that, readings that had been planned as book launches, at local bookstores like Drawn & Quarterly, VERSeFest in Ottawa, the Montreal Review of Books spring launch, and an Atwater library poetry reading were all cancelled. Meanwhile, reading series organizers were quickly thinking of ways to move readings online. Individual writers started posting themselves reading in YouTube videos or on Instagram Live posts, but within the first days of everything changing, rob mclennan in Ottawa, Isabella Wang in Vancouver, and Ian Ferrier in Montreal were experimenting with moving entire reading series events online. Instead of the usual posts on Where Poets Read, I started posting links to live streams of readings and I started to wonder how are we listening to poetry readings now, now that we can't go out to listen to them in person, together?
00:07:56
Jason Camlot:
Right, so we're both thinking about how we're listening now under the present circumstances of social distancing and self-isolation, and thinking about our new experiences and practices of listening, especially within a range of literary contexts, including reading literature silently at home, teaching and discussing literature in the classroom, and performing literature on a stage at a poetry reading. So let's turn to our first real conversation about these questions that we held on Zoom on March 26th, 2020, a little more than a week after the government-mandated lockdown and soon after I taught my first virtual class on the work of talk poet David Antin.
00:08:40
Jason Camlot:
[Sound Effect: Zoom Teleconferencing Chimes] Hello?
00:08:42
Katherine McLeod:
Hello, can you hear me?
00:08:44
Jason Camlot:
Yeah, hi Katherine.
00:08:46
Katherine McLeod:
Hi.
00:08:47
Jason Camlot:
Wait, let me turn my video on. Where are you, in your kitchen?
00:08:54
Katherine McLeod:
No, actually I'm in my office room.
00:09:02
Jason Camlot:
How're you doing?
00:09:04
Katherine McLeod:
I'm good, given the situation. But yeah, today felt definitely more like a challenge to get started. Yeah, just... It took more energy to get going.
00:09:23
Jason Camlot:
Yeah, me too. I had a terrible sleep last night, I kept waking up like almost every hour. So...
00:09:27
Katherine McLeod:
I just made coffee now and I sent myself a text last night to give myself instructions for the morning and they said, "Make coffee, dance, be." I've done the first two and now I am in a state of being.
00:09:43
Jason Camlot:
Yeah, you seem like you're being--
00:09:44
Katherine McLeod:
Yeah!
00:09:44
Jason Camlot:
--so that's good. You could check all three off. I like the idea of not only self-isolating, but self-texting.
00:09:52
Katherine McLeod:
Yeah!
00:09:52
Jason Camlot:
Sort of like, wow, we're in some crazy individual loops here, you know?
00:09:58
Katherine McLeod:
Yeah, I only send them as reminders to myself, but who knows, maybe by the end of this I'll be having a full conversation with me over text.
00:10:05
Jason Camlot:
Oh, man...
00:10:10
Music:
[Instrumental Piano]
00:10:10
Jason Camlot:
You can really hear the low-level anxiety and fatigue in our voices.
00:10:13
Katherine McLeod:
Yeah. So many Zoom conversations seem to have to begin this way now, with these kinds of emotional check-ins. And these are so important because we're all feeling overwhelmed. But that's also hard stuff to dive into at the start of a conversation. And I know I find myself saying that "I'm good. Oh, given the situation," like I do in that recording. And then, when you listen between the lines, you can hear that the real answer to that question is more complicated than ever.
00:10:45
Jason Camlot:
It's one example of how we're listening to each other a bit differently these days. Listening maybe with slightly more sensitivity to the other person's mood. Listening to hear just how anxious or depressed someone is before you embark on an actual conversation about something else.
00:11:01
Katherine McLeod:
We did have a real conversation, though, after this affective, close-listening warm-up. I asked you how your class went.
00:11:10
Jason Camlot:
We had to go back to teach online this week, so I held my seminar again and it went really well. I was surprised, like, and it was really great to see everyone. Everyone joined, everyone participated, and I think everyone was actually quite grateful because we've been reading all semester different theories of sort of how sound is mediated, different sort of audile techniques, you know, ways of listening, listening to voice, listening to other sounds. You know, the idea of soundscapes and the idea of voice and concepts of presence and things like that. I felt it was going to be unavoidable that we talk about what our listening situations are right now. And so since they were kind of equipped with a whole bunch of readings on that, on thinking about listening and sound, I did sort of tell them before class, I sent them all an email saying that the top of the class would be spent... Each of them would sort of give us a little bit of an account of how they're listening now, sort of what their listening situation is and how their interactions with sounds may have changed as a result of them having to self-isolate.
00:12:14
Jason Camlot:
It seems like we are re-negotiating our relationship to signals, noise, and silence. [Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] These different categories of sound are all related to each other. One can't really mean much without the other. Noise is defined in relation to the signal, the thing we're actually trying to hear. We speak of the signal-to-noise ratio. With a weak reception or a low signal-to-noise ratio, the signal will be lost in surrounding interference or noise, so that we can hardly hear the message or not hear it at all. With a strong reception, a high signal-to-noise ratio, [Sound Effect: Pulsing Tone] the signal will come through clearly and we hardly hear or notice the noise at all. [Sound Effect: Wind Chimes] [End Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental]
00:13:05
Jason Camlot:
Listen to this extended cross-fade of two clips, one of brown noise and another of a sharp emergency signal. It dramatizes the movement from a low to high--
00:13:17
Audio Recording:
[Robotic Voice] --signal-to-noise ratio.
00:13:18
Audio Recording:
[Audio, begins with "brown noise", a soft static-y sound, and fades into the pulsing tone played earlier, the "emergency signal"]
00:13:34
Jason Camlot:
As human listeners, we're usually pretty good at hearing the signal at the expense of the noise. [Begin Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] Murray Schafer says in his book The Soundscape that "noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore." He was thinking about noise within environmental soundscapes, which he thought about as a composer would in terms of acoustic design. One thing that has come to our ears' attention as a result of living the circumstances of a global pandemic and experiencing locally by staying at home, sticking to our neighborhoods and our own living spaces is the absence of the noises we were so good at ignoring under normal, noisy circumstances. [End Music: Slightly Distorted Techno Instrumental] The absence of the noises around us effects our mood, our sense of our place in the world, and leads us to compensate with different forms of listening. So we can speak of noise and silence in our sound environments and their effects on how we feel.
00:14:35
Ali Barillaro:
I live next to a bar, so normally there's a lot of noise outside of my apartment on a regular basis even if it's not like the weekend
00:14:43
Jason Camlot:
Master's student Ali Barillaro.
00:14:45
Ali Barillaro:
So not hearing people drunkenly shouting at 3:00 AM has been kind of strange. I don't necessarily mind it not being there because I'm definitely sleeping a lot easier, but it's definitely weird because that's kind of been a constant and I've lived here for almost two years now. So that's weird and different.
00:15:06
Jason Camlot:
The absence of either noise or signal becomes present to us in the form of noticeable silence. Biochemist and doctoral candidate in English Marlene Oeffinger.
00:15:16
Marlene Oeffinger:
It's almost like I feel with all the news and everything that we're listening to there's this constant barrage of noise. And then we were sitting on Saturday evening on the couch in our living room next to the window and usually Saturday evening is... You hear people walking outside talking, you hear cars, you hear planes. And so we were sitting and reading and not listening to the news and I suddenly had to stop because I realized how silent it was. It was dead silent and that's just something I kind of associate not with the city and definitely not with the area here on a Saturday night. And it was just really completely silent. There was no noise from any neighbour, nothing. And it was almost distracting, the silence. 'Cause I couldn't stop listening to the silence. And yeah, I couldn't even focus on what I was reading anymore because it was so unusual, I felt. It was just such a novel sound for the surrounding. Yeah, and that's why I guess I just kept listening to it and it kept distracting me really from what I was doing.
00:16:20
Jason Camlot:
The soundscapes outside have changed, but our relationship to the soundscapes within our domestic spaces have also changed. They become more complicated. We're sensing how strange it can feel when spaces that one depends on for certain kinds of noise don't sound the same, get quieter, or go silent altogether. But we're also becoming more aware of our need for spaces that allow us periods of silence. My students told me how they had to work hard to find those spaces and how they're now having to schedule slots of time for silent work. Thinking, writing, at home. PhD student Lindsay Presswell.
00:17:01
Lindsay Presswell:
So my personal situation in my house is that my partner is a musician [Begin Music: Instrumental Guitar] and so normally he's kind of here and he has a studio set up just over in the corner. And normally I'm like, I need to be out of the house. Like I have to be in the library or like in an atmosphere which very much feels like I'm working. But we actually have had to carefully negotiate the use of this space. We just started a Google Calendar this morning where I'm like inputting my lectures and like when I need to be sort of reading in silence 'cause I'm a very needy reader, I guess. We've discovered, like, putting in these soundproof headphones that he has, so I couldn't hear the music as he's working on things on the computer. But what that does is it... He like breathes loudly? [End Music: Instrumental Guitar] [Sound Effect: Heavy Breathing] Like, when those are in his ears, which I've never heard him breathe in my entire life. But that's like a fun new thing.
00:18:02
Katherine McLeod:
Breathing is definitely one of those sounds we don't usually notice. But Lindsay's situation spells out just how sensitive we're becoming to sounds that are usually invisible to our ears.
00:18:14
Music:
[Instrumental Guitar]
00:18:14
Jason Camlot:
Many of my students are engaged in similar kinds of sound-space negotiations, as I am at home with my family. But we also seem to need to fill ourselves with particular kinds of sounds to compensate for the lack of sounds and noise that define our states of normalcy. My sense is people are maybe talking to each other more than they had been even if they're doing so at a distance. My students were telling me that they're getting off of social media and picking up the phone in ways that they normally wouldn't do.
00:18:42
Priscilla Joly:
Yeah, I think people want to talk more at this time, particularly my parents. They call, like, very frequently now.
00:18:50
Jason Camlot:
That was Priscilla Joly, a PhD student in English.
00:18:53
Lindsay Presswell:
And then just in terms of, like, the sort of broader situation, I noticed that my tolerance for noise that also feels fast or jarring has slowed, too. I'm like needing direct, verbal communication more than sending texts. Rather than like reading the news and doing my emails on the commute, I'm like finding time listening to traditional media or calling people as well, which normally I don't do because I associate speaking like it's a slow way of communicating. I deactivated my Twitter account very quickly last week because [Begin Music: Soft Ambient Instrumental] I was just like, this is not the kind of... These aren't the sounds... This isn't the news that I want to be listening to.
00:19:42
Jason Camlot:
PhD student Lindsay Presswell. John Durham Peters and his description of the uncanniness that surrounded early telephonic communication—talking into telephones—noted the existential anxiety that came from relying on the voice to do it all. That is, to do all the work of communicating one's thoughts, feelings, and presence to another person. He talks about the disquiet of a medium defined by strange voices entering the home, the disappearance of one's words into an empty black hole in the absence of the listener's face. And he suggests that the telephone contributed to the modern derangement of dialogue by splitting conversation into two halves that meet only in the cyberspace of the wires. And that's when telecommunications media relied on wires from start to finish. I cancelled my landline five years ago and threw myself at the mercy of wireless communication. Course, there's still fiber optic cables at work, but wireless communication, the forms of interpersonal exchange we're now forced to have instead of most and sometimes any form of interpersonal exchange, represent a further kind of derangement. The condensed and proximate signal [Sound Effect: Dial Tone] that came through the carbon microphone of the old-timey telephone in my teenage experience, at least, came to feel intimate in its own powerfully reduced way. The banal, unexpected kinds of disruptions we experience when we try to Skype, Zoom, and FaceTime [Sound Effect: Voices Breaking Up In Call] are too annoying and thinning to live up to Durham Peter's sort of romantic idea of telephonic derangement. Grandiose concepts of sympathy, relationality, intimate connection are reduced to the irritatingly tinny sounding idea of connectivity. [End Music: Soft Ambient Instrumental]
00:21:38
Audio Recording:
[Audio, Katherine McLeod's voice breaking up during a call, sounding tinny and distorted]
00:21:44
Katherine McLeod:
Why was that happening to my voice there?
00:21:46
Jason Camlot:
I was wondering about that myself and so I started googling for answers. [Sound Effect: Electronic Interference] Part of it has to do with the way digital information is sent. We're not getting interference with a continuous signal along the wire here. Our voices are transduced and converted into frequency data and then sent via a wifi signal as data packets, like assemblages of bits of data that add up to the sound of your voice. [Begin Music: Instrumental Piano Overlaid With Electronic Interference] The computer waits for packets that represent a good signal-to-noise ratio of your voice. If something interferes with the analog signal that's sending the data, then the computer, let's say it's listening for the right formula of your voice, will have trouble understanding, let's say hearing the packets of data, will reject them as noise, and then wait for them to be sent again. When this keeps happening, you either get partial delivery of the packets, which sounds weird or complete drop-outs. Sort of like if a Star Trek teleportation goes horribly wrong because all the disassembled molecules of the person didn't come back together again or like when Ron Weasley gets seriously splinched in that bad apparating accident in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Ron left part of his upper arm behind; we leave packets of our voice signal behind. Still, even if old-style landline telephones sometimes sounded better than cell phones and Zoom, these newer media in the present context of social isolation are making us feel what's at stake in a scenario that suggests the loss of real old-time hanging out in person. My students were clear in expressing the frustration they felt from bad connections. [End Music: Instrumental Piano Overlaid With Electronic Interference]
00:23:24
Ali Barillaro:
My internet connection's not the best--
00:23:28
Jason Camlot:
Ali Barillaro.
00:23:28
Ali Barillaro:
--so listening to people through quite a bit of distortion has been a weird thing to kind of manage and just sort of... I've had to kind of let it happen and not let it get frustrating. Dealing with the weird kind of distortions and sometimes when the sound cuts off completely it'll take a couple of seconds and then restart, but almost as if someone's pressed fast forward. So trying to keep track of everything is kind of interesting.
00:23:58
Jason Camlot:
And in talking to my students, I let myself get carried away and waxed philosophical about the existential implications of a weak wifi signal.
00:24:06
Jason Camlot:
[Audio, from a video call with his class] Your point about the frustration of communicating with people, especially through wifi-based telecommunication system, which is what we're doing so much and what the university is having us do right now, I think is super important as well. It's frustrating when you feel like you can't have the confidence in the voice continuing. That's a huge difference between in-person communication. You're not worried about them breaking up in front of you and it makes you just incredibly aware of the fact that when we're communicating we're dealing with signal transduction, which is more than just annoying, actually. It's kind of existentially traumatic and troubling. It's like that we don't know that we can count on the continuity of the person and the communication that we're engaging in.
00:24:49
Jason Camlot:
Still, we are relying on Zoom and Zoom-like platforms as best we can for the social encounters that we crave. Here, I'd say we're feeling the absence of a different kind of noise that we're also very good at ignoring and not hearing under normal conditions, but the absence of which we notice in a strong way in these dangerous times. We are noticing the absence of social sounds and that absence becomes a distracting kind of silence. MA student in English Kian Vaziri-Tehrani.
00:25:20
Kian Vaziri-Tehrani:
There's kind of been sort of an avoidance of silence, if that makes sense. I live in a pretty, like, quiet neighborhood. It's Côte-Saint Luc. But yeah, it's generally like a really, really quiet neighbourhood and I go out my balcony a lot and it's pitch quiet. So I guess like I just kind of... The TV's always on or I'm always listening to something and I feel like if it's too quiet then I'm... Something's wrong or something's off about it. Like I've just been filling my senses up, I guess.
00:25:49
Jason Camlot:
[Sound Effect: Various Voices Echoing and Overlaid] I'm thinking in particular of the experience of sounds reverberating within a space that makes us feel we are present in a real, material, and social environment alongside others. Something along the lines of what Brandon LaBelle was talking about when he says that "the sonorous world always presses in, adding extra ingredients by which we locate ourselves." We are increasingly interested in those interstitial noises that suggest life and movement and social activity. PhD student Sadie Barker.
00:26:22
Sadie Barker:
I find I'm much more aware of my neighbours' sounds in the apartment building and I think interested in them and like inclined to speculate into them or like imagine into them just because... Yeah, I find when I hear like the doorbell ringing, I'm like, "Are people having people over? Are they socializing?" You know, you're just kind of, yeah, more intrigued.
00:26:44
Jason Camlot:
We might become intensive, causal listeners like Sadie, trying to decipher the causes, the things, actions, activities that go with the sounds we're suddenly noticing. Or we might just be craving those little otherwise meaningless sounds because they suggest a real person in an actual space.
00:27:02
Katherine McLeod:
It's like the difference between listening to an archival documentary recording of a poetry reading--
00:27:06
Audio Recording:
[Audio, muffled recording of people laughing and chatting]
00:27:11
Katherine McLeod:
--you can hear all kinds of vibrations in the room other than those of the poet's voice. Clinking, shuffling, breathing, laughter, applause. Compared to a studio recording, like something Caedmon Records would have made in the 1950s--
00:27:26
Audio Recording:
[Audio, Sylvia Plath reciting her poem "Daddy"] The black telephone’s off at the root, / The voices just can’t worm through.
00:27:31
Katherine McLeod:
--where the strong signal of the poet's voice seems to exist in a sort of vacuum outside of any recognizable sonic space in the universe.
00:27:42
Jason Camlot:
[Sound Effect: Various Childrens' Voices Echoing and Overlaid] In this present moment of social distancing, I think we're craving the noise around the signal rather than the signal itself. We're being bombarded with all kinds of messages, [Begin Music: Sparkly Instrumental] but really we want the comforting sounds of an actual person in a real environment. Philosopher Mladen Dolar might say we're craving voice itself rather than the messages that voice carries. [End Music: Sparkly Instrumental]
00:28:04
Jason Camlot:
PhD student Klara du Plessis.
00:28:08
Klara du Plessis:
I have definitely been phoning a lot more like every day I have two or three telephone conversations with friends who I'm close with, but would usually just text with or something. So there's definitely this move towards trying to communicate more or to de-distance ourselves, I guess.
00:28:25
Jason Camlot:
Voice is that medium made up of accent, intonation, and timbre that carries the message but disappears in the process. Usually we don't notice it because we're so focused on the message. In this instance, voice is the noise and the meaning is the signal. It's like what Dolar says about voice and a heavy accent. A heavy accent suddenly makes us aware of the material support of the voice, which we tend, immediately, to discard. Well, now we seem to be craving the accent. I'm speaking metaphorically here using Dolar's account of voice as an ever-disappearing, yet undeniably present entity to help describe what we feel when we try to be together on Zoom or Skype or something like that, and sort of are together, but at the same time really aren't together.
00:29:19
Katherine McLeod:
The sounds around the signal, the sounds that add the vibrancy to the social, the sense of a real unique person speaking are what we're listening for, but even when we hear these sounds, we're kind of aware that they're evoking a scenario of actual presence that isn't happening right now.
00:29:37
Jason Camlot:
Because I've been on Twitter a lot more than usual, I read a tweet—this was early April—posted by Gianpiero Petriglieri that suggested we're so exhausted after video calls because we're experiencing "the plausible deniability of each other's absence. Our minds are tricked into the idea of actually being together. While our bodies know that we're not" actually together. He's suggesting it's the dissonance of being relentlessly in the presence of each other's absence that makes us so tired.
00:30:08
Katherine McLeod:
This may be especially true during graduate seminars and poetry readings and probably even more so in relaxed meetings like the video conference parties and cocktail hours that have been happening more often.
00:30:22
Audio Recording:
[Audio, same various voices speaking from earlier] [Glasses Clinking] I love tarte tatin. I love tarte tatin. We're gonna do it tomorrow. No, tonight! Okay. Is it almost bedtime? Yeah. Duh. Oh, Mickey's outside, shit! Hang on. I gotta go get the dog. You hear him barking? Jason, you lost, your whole family went away. Where'd they go? Jason's frozen. No, no he doesn't move! I know, I know! He does it on purpose! I know! You told me your trick! Yeah, you knew I was faking it. You just couldn't help it! [inaudible] Welcome back. [Door Shutting]
00:31:04
Jason Camlot:
That clip we just heard was from the middle of the video conference cocktail hour—or two—I held with some friends just after I taught my first online seminar that I've been talking about.
00:31:14
Katherine McLeod:
Hearing the clinks of glasses at the beginning, the laughter, the spontaneous references to things happening within the individual spaces of the teleconference participants along with the things happening across those spaces, through the screen, really did evoke the sound of an intimate social gathering for me. At times it sounded like you were all there together. Other times, not so much. It was actually really hard for me to tell who was where.
00:31:41
Jason Camlot:
It was a lot of fun. But hearing each other and seeing each other and ourselves through the flat screens of our laptops made me want to crawl through and be there. Wherever "there" is.
00:31:55
Katherine McLeod:
That reminds me of the title of the poem in David Antin's book Talking At The Boundaries, the one called "what am i doing here?" The one where he asks himself, stepping into a space to create a poem by talking rather than reading the poems from a book, what am I doing here in this ambiance? What's going to happen? Am I doing poetry here? How are we here together? Am I making art here? Just what exactly am I doing here? But that kind of question, the way he asks it in that poem, maybe it can't be asked in the same way of the here, now.
00:32:36
Jason Camlot:
Following that opening conversation with the students in my class, which lasted about 40 minutes and functioned as part sonic listening analysis and part group therapy session, and just before the Zoom cocktail gathering I had with my friends, which was also like a therapy listening session, I did, eventually, segway into a two-hour class about the talk poetry of David Antin.
00:32:57
Jason Camlot:
[Audio, from a video call with his class] But let's start at the beginning, I guess, and let's start with Antin and ask how do we begin to actually define what an Antin talk poem is and how do we define it as an entity? So let's begin by thinking about what it is, what's the artifact, what's the thing that we're organizing a conversation around? What could you glean from what you've read and listened to as to sort of what the production process of a talk poem is? And maybe that's one way into beginning to define it. And we can think of it generically, we can think of it other ways, but sort of if we think of what is a talk poem, you know, how does he make them?
00:33:34
Jason Camlot:
David Antin seemed like a deeply relevant artist to be thinking about just now because his poetry originates in live, in-person talking before an audience. He called himself a talk poet. He would come to a venue with some idea of what he was gonna talk about, perhaps a title or a theme, and a few stories in mind. But then he would just stand there and create a poem before a live audience. By talking.
00:34:01
Audio Recording:
[Audio, David Antin saying his talk poem “The Principle of Fit, II”] I came here with an intention to do a piece relating to something I'd been thinking about and because I don't come unprepared to do pieces. On the other hand, I don't come prepared the way one comes to a lesson. I haven't studied the material very carefully, but I had in mind to consider what I was calling the principle of fit, the way in which there is a certain fit, a kind of adjusted togetherness, the calmness, in certain social, socially structured events as between patients and their doctors or between patients and their diseases. It's a very close social relation and one that takes a certain education.
00:34:53
Katherine McLeod:
If you listen really closely, you can hear the tape noises on that recording of Antin doing a talk poem. [Static From The Recording]
00:34:59
Jason Camlot:
He would go into a room with an audience, press record on his tape recorder, and start talking. Not reading, not reciting a written text. Just thinking a poem into existence by talking it out loud in front of other people. That's the first iteration of the talk poem: actual ephemeral talk in a room filled with real people. He would also record his talks on a tape recorder, hence the tape hiss you noticed in that audible trace of the event. He'd take that tape recorder home, transcribe the talk that was on it, and then shape that typed transcript into a unique-looking printed work without punctuation, with special spacing, designed to make the reader have to reinvoice the original talk back to life by finding the speech and intonation patterns that are not obvious to find in the printed treatment of the original, ephemeral live event.
00:35:51
Jason Camlot:
[Audio, from a video call with his class] So, if we continue to ask this question, what is a talk poem, okay, and we've just rehearsed in a brief way what the production process of a talk poem is, where is the talk poem? I guess that's my second question, right? Is it in that event, right? Is it in the tape recorder, on the cassette that recorded it? Is it in the initial transcription of it? Is it in the book Talking At The Boundaries after that event happens? Where is the talk poem? Or is it in, or is it that combination of things? Yeah, Brian, you want to..?
00:36:22
Brian Vass:
I guess thinking about this question also just sort of dovetails to the question that I asked on group chat.
00:36:28
Jason Camlot:
Master's student Brian Vass.
00:36:31
Brian Vass:
It seems to me that if the talk poem as a piece of art or as a event, if it hinges to some degree on the reciprocity between Antin as a performer and a speaker and the specific context that he's in, as he seems to sort of describe that it does, like he says he's got something in mind, but even the spontaneity and some degree of the improvisation is influenced or inflected by the context, specifically the people in the room, to the extent that that's true. It seems like the real site of the talk poem is the occasion and everything else, the recording and the transcription are sort of derivations of that, but somehow aren't fully it because you're part of it if you're there. Do you know what I mean? Like the audience is also a part of it. If it's true, what he's saying about vibing off of the group.
00:37:21
Jason Camlot:
I like that, vibing off of the group. So it's talking, but as you say, it's sort of talking with an audience present that seems to be important because of this reciprocity as you put it. But it's more about him vibing off of them than about actual conversation. It's not talking for conversation. It's talking for the sense that he's not talking in a vacuum. There's a kind of priority that's given to that original ephemeral event due to this scenario of talking in person before an actual listening audience.
00:37:58
Jason Camlot:
The discussion we had of Antin seemed so appropriate and relevant to us at this moment, I think, because his art was premised on, depended on the act of talking in the presence of other people. If we think about the new scientific evidence coming in that suggests even asymptomatic people can possibly spread the coronavirus, it makes talking to someone in person a truly perilous scenario. We're not allowed to talk before large groups of people right now. It's literally against the law. Literary performance, poetry readings, literary gatherings are not possible in that way. But it sort of got us thinking, you know, some of the students were sort of asked what would David Antin do during COVID-19 crisis? Because he's not, he wouldn't be allowed to actually stand in a room before an assembled audience, right? And that was, you know, in many of their opinions and in my opinion, too, crucial to the actual creation of a talk poem. That talk poem requires the presence of others within one space, right, in order to actually to be made in the first place. So like, you know, imagining David Antin on Zoom or Skype doing a talk poem, it's not quite the same thing.
00:39:07
Music:
[Gentle Instrumental]
00:39:08
Katherine McLeod:
So we can't do talk poems. We can't read poems before an actual audience. We can't talk to strangers or speak moistly. Without talking to people in person how can we share art? How can we share literature? How can we share our work under the present conditions? How can we reach listeners? Today, not only are we listening differently in general, but we're sharing and listening to literature differently. Think about when you listen to literature in your day-to-day life and has that changed? Just as before, you might listen to an audio book or to a podcast and you might listen to that more than before, but the method of listening probably remains the same. What has changed is that you can't listen to a live reading or at least not in the same space as the reader and other listeners. Literary events have been cancelled or as we prefer to think of it postponed. But we can still listen to writers reading their works and even participate in a live online reading as an event.
00:40:15
Ian Ferrier:
[Audio, from a past Zoom call] Good evening and welcome to a fine winter evening of literature and some poems and some music. We're very lucky to have two visitors from the great state of Toronto tonight. So all of this should be really fun. And to lead off the show tonight, I asked this person how she would like to be introduced and she wanted to be introduced by me telling you that she lives beside a lake.
00:40:46
Katherine McLeod:
[Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] That was a recording of Ian Ferrier performing his usual role as live host and curator of The Words & Music Show, a monthly cabaret of poetry, music, dance, and spoken word performances that's been happening in Montreal for the past 20 years. At the end of March, the show went online with performers sending in pre-recorded audio to be played in the live event broadcast via Zoom. [End Music: Gentle Instrumental] Some of the artists, like storyteller Nisha Coleman, integrated into their performances the circumstances and impact of COVID-19 upon artists who depend upon live events. Nisha's story was about the time she spent hanging out in a community art collective called The Church of Harvey Christ. And this is how she chose to end her story this time.
00:41:36
Nisha Coleman:
[Audio, from a past recording] Now, I've told this story a lot of times. It's one I've told at parties and campfires and on stage. And every time I tell it, it's sort of, I sort of tell it in a different way and it has a different meaning, it has a different sort of takeaway. But I think in this particular telling for me what stands out about this story is the strength of community, right? And, and what The Church of Harvey Christ meant to artists and what it provided for them at that time and how important that community is now. I mean, especially now. Because being an artist, you know, it's precarious, of course. It's precarious in the best of times and now we're entering a new time where it's sort of precarious for everybody. So, I think it's more important than ever to have this community, whether it be in person together singing hymns and drinking out of the same beer bottle, or, you know, maintaining this connection over the internet. Because we need each other, we need to lift each other up. We need to help each other out. We need to promote each other's work. I think that's gonna be really important in the next however long. Who knows, right?
00:42:54
Katherine McLeod:
Other performances really emphasized the dissolution of boundaries between the public and private spaces that come with a video conference, reading from home. That was the case with poet Alexei Perry Cox.
00:43:08
Ian Ferrier:
[Audio, from a past Zoom call] ...extreme conditions of trying to do it at the same time as she entertained her 18-month-old child on her bed and it's by the poet Alexei Perry Cox. So I'm going to bring that up now and we can take a listen.
00:43:21
Audio Recording:
[Audio, Alexei Perry Cox reciting with the sounds of her baby cooing in the background] My lover believed there had to be a point at which reality, perfect incongruence, would get through to humankind.
00:43:30
Katherine McLeod:
Now, I have to admit that for this particular recording, my screen didn't display the video, so even though others watched the reading, I was just listening. As a listener, I felt that Alexei's poem conveyed such presence through its recording. Yes, I was listening to the poem, too, but I was also listening and deeply moved by the sounds of her daughter's presence in the room with her and the interaction between them.
00:44:01
Audio Recording:
[Audio, Alexei Perry Cox reciting with the sounds of her baby cooing in the background] A book with a room for the world would be no book. It would lack the most beautiful pages, the ones left, in which even the smallest pebble is reflected. But present is the time of writing, both obsessed with and cut off from an out-of-time bringing of life.
00:44:25
Katherine McLeod:
Even more than the words of the poem, I was listening to the sounds around the poem, the sounds of the social and of life. When you're at a live reading, you're there to listen to the poetry or prose, but so often the experience of the reading is the atmosphere, the ambiance, as Antin put it, and the conversations around the poems. And that's much harder to describe, harder to document, and harder to replicate in a digital environment.
00:44:55
Isabella Wang:
In any other circumstance, when we are, there is this live community happening in the backdrop. I would be more hesitant to just go online and hear the works of a poet reading on the internet because there is that community out there. And I'm like, "Why would I want to like, you know, see this somewhat flat screen of you when I can interact with you in person and engage?"
00:45:24
Katherine McLeod:
That was Isabella Wang, who had the idea to go online with the reading series she helps organize in Vancouver, BC: Dead Poets Reading Series.
00:45:33
Isabella Wang:
The Dead Poets Reading Series is a bi-monthly series at the Vancouver Public Library. We invite like four or five local poets to come and share the work of a dead poet. And so this happened around the time where everything around Vancouver—I mean everything, like not just in Vancouver, but everything—was getting cancelled. And so of course our reading series was also canceled, too, and we had four readers who no longer could come and share their work. I actually... It's funny you mentioned rob because I actually got the idea from him. And so when I started hearing that "Oh no, we might not actually be able to put on this reading series at the Vancouver Public Library," I was like, "Hey, rob is doing this thing. How can we maybe try to, you know, move this online?" And initially we were just planning to feature the four readers who couldn't read anymore. But then it was kind of intuitive and it made sense. I was like, now that we featured Kathy Mak and Natalie Lim, who were supposed to be on the series, let's start reaching out to more folks and it just started there.
00:46:47
Katherine McLeod:
The Dead Poets Reading Series is a bit of a ghostly series to begin with. [Begin Music: Low Pulsing Instrumental] So how did it work transferring this series into an online environment?
00:46:58
Isabella Wang:
The reading series has definitely transformed a lot. Some poets were saying how, you know, it's hard for them to film themselves reading at home just because there isn't that reciprocal audience thing going on anymore and it's kind of like numbing. But at the same time, what the digital-like realm is so good at bringing out is a different sense of community where like before we were so limited to audiences just in Vancouver. And so that limited a lot of not only who our readers were, but also what kind of dead poets were being shared and spread. And so for the first time I think we were able to bring in a lot of our friends from different places that normally we would only get to see on social media anyway. And it was when the series started that I realized, "Oh my gosh, I've known you and you and you like for so long. And this is actually the first time I've seen you, you know, move and be alive. And this is the first time I've ever heard you read."
00:48:05
Jason Camlot:
I asked Isabella about her experience of listening to readings online versus in person.[End Music: Low Pulsing Instrumental]
00:48:10
Isabella Wang:
What's really changed is the interactive environment, that lively, bustling atmosphere that is somewhat changed now with, you know, this going online. 'Cause I think part of the literary experience is that interaction, that engagement with poets like before and after they read. You know, 'cause it's nice to hear Fred Wah read, but it's also nice to just talk to him and make jokes with him, like, you know, by his side in the audience. And that's not really there anymore. And that's what's been transformed mostly into the, into social media now. And so there's still that, I think, you know, the liking and sharing and commenting. But it's more invisible, it's something that is more of an... Like you see it after they post something but it's not that immediate anymore.
00:49:09
Jason Camlot:
That's really interesting. Yeah, I love the idea of response happening in a different temporal sort of timeframe than the actual event, is really interesting. And also in a different media format, so that instead of leaning over to someone and whispering or nudging them with your elbow and exchanging a kind of feeling about what you just heard, it's being experienced later in a tweet or something like that.
00:49:33
Isabella Wang:
And I think it's also like the function is kind of different because, you know, when you've always had that community that you go to like day in and day out, you know, you love seeing the people you see, but kind of take it for granted. It's like, "Oh yeah, next week I'll see them again." And, you know, there will always be literary events. And I think, I think this period just shows us how important that community and those like events really are to us. And so part of that, social media like that, commenting and interaction is part of just supporting each other and making sure that we're still going and there is still a sense of community somewhere.
00:50:22
Katherine McLeod:
In a poetry reading, you are listening to the poetry, but you're also listening to community. So the challenge then becomes how to create and make audible that community online. I was so interested in how Isabella's idea for taking Dead Poets online came from an invitation to read in an online series that went online on that very same weekend of March 14th–15th, 2020. That reading series is hosted on the online journal _Periodicities _and the poet behind it is Ottawa-based poet, reviewer, and publisher r ob m cl ennan[13]. Jason and I spoke with r ob in a video conference call and we asked him about what prompted him to start this online reading series.
00:51:08
rob mclennan:
There are kind of a few factors in play. I'm one of the organizing reading series, founding reading series, of VERSefest, our annual poetry festival. This year would have been tenth, so... We realized, like, we were ten days out of our opening night and we realized like, yeah, this is not going to happen. We have to shut this down.
00:51:31
Katherine McLeod:
With the cancellation of Ottawa's VERSfest, rob felt the absence of readings that would have happened. He was also starting up the online journal _Periodicities _and had the web space ready to curate a reading series. He reached out to poets and was met with an enthusiastic response of poets sending him videos of themselves reading poems. We asked him about his sense of how listeners are responding to all of this new content. Are they listening? But first one of Jason's students, poet reading series curator and PhD candidate Klara du Plessis, was asking the same questions when some of these reading events started going online. She mentioned it in Jason's class, so we thought we'd include her perspective before hearing from r ob on this question.
00:52:19
Klara du Plessis:
Well, yeah, I guess I wanted to talk a little bit about all these virtual poetry reading series, like multiple different people have started. So they kind of invite poets to read between like five and 15 minutes or so to record themselves reading either their own poetry or poetry by someone who's already passed away and then these videos are posted online. And so I kind of got into a bit of a Twitter thing where I kind of questioned whether people were actually listening to these recordings or whether it was like something for poets to just be busy, so they're doing something. And my poll discovered that half of the people said that they were super comforted by listening to these virtual poetry readings and felt a sense of connection and community as a result. And half of the other people said that it was like too overwhelming for them at this time to deal with, you know, listening to strange, like sometimes not very well produced audio recordings. I should also mention that I think I offended a few people with my question so I kind of regretted it after the fact.
00:53:23
rob mclennan:
I know early on I saw some social media posts of people saying like, "I appreciate that these things happen, but I just can't deal with it right now." You know, one or two other people saying like, "I don't even know why this is happening." Which is fine, I don't expect every human on the planet to say, "This is awesome, I'm in." That is not the point of any endeavor. But for those who might want it or require it, it is there. And for those who don't want it, there are other things.
00:53:52
Jason Camlot:
I asked rob as he was watching these videos come in, if he noticed a blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private,
00:53:59
rob mclennan:
I have noticed that; it becomes slightly more intimate, right? Like as opposed to being public. I like watching people do stuff from inside their houses [Sound Effect: Clattering And Moving] or apartments or their, yeah, like you say, bedroom or from their living room table or their makeshift home office because not everyone has a home office. I find that more interesting than someone sending me a more produced video. I'm open to that. I've posted some of those. But I just find them just less interesting than something made just for this, with the limitations of that. So like the artifice is gone and one would hope that maybe that intimacy, like we require it now if we're not able to get it in other ways. So it's actually maybe helpful as someone... Whether watching or being the one making the video that is actually making this distance less difficult.
00:54:55
Katherine McLeod:
Yeah. No, I think that's such a good point. And it's, and also realizing that we're kind of maybe even enjoying those readings a little bit more 'cause we're not just hearing the person, we're hearing sort of the space around them and they're interacting with--
00:55:07
rob mclennan:
Yeah!
00:55:07
Katherine McLeod:
Yeah.
00:55:07
rob mclennan:
Yeah, they're not, they're not at the same microphone, the same backdrop. It's actually a little more interesting just watching the limitations of the space. Like, "Oh okay, someone has a smaller space than another person." And just watching their personal effects behind them and none of those spaces really surprised me. Like, okay, yeah, this person is a little more formal than another person and this person feels a little bit more domestic, say. Yeah, I like it. And yeah, it does feel like a little bit more of a connection, but then maybe we're just making that, we're seeking that connection, so we're finding that connection. That's fine, too.
00:55:42
Katherine McLeod:
Since the first set of videos [Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] were uploaded to rob's YouTube on March 15th, there are now over 70 videos and the collection seems to be growing each day. The videos are becoming an ecology of recordings in that they're networked sounds and representative of the poetry community that they're growing from. Listening to literature now and specifically poetry in a digital environment becomes a kind of ecological listening. We're listening to interconnectedness and relationality and we're also listening to an evolving digital soundscape. Just as the soundscapes around us are changing, public places that would be bustling are empty and the sound of a plane overhead [Sound Effect: Plane Flying By] suddenly stands out when otherwise it would fade into the background noise. Yes, our Murray Schafer was right. Noises are the sounds that we have learned to ignore. Meanwhile, projects like Cities and Memory are documenting the changing soundscapes. #StayHomeSounds invites you to listen to the sounds from the global coronavirus lockdown. And as we walk through our own neighbourhoods, we may notice streets sounding quieter and the chirping of birds sounding louder. Our sensory experiences of our inner and outer worlds have changed. As we listen inwards to ourselves, we still find ways to connect that try to replicate the social. Outside of our homes, there have been invitations—multiple times now—to the entire city of Montreal to join in balcony singalongs to Leonard Cohen's "So Long, Marianne." [End Music: Gentle Instrumental]
00:57:22
Music:
[Alvaro Echánove singing along to a livestream of Martha Wainwright singing "So Long, Marianne" by Leonard Cohen]
00:57:28
Katherine McLeod:
As the summer arrives, balconies will become even noisier as neighbours converse. We have conversations with neighbours we may never have spoken to before and simultaneously we're even more connected globally. Our phones and computer screens become the new stages. [Begin Music: Gentle Instrumental] Live-streamed readings are happening like Poetry in the Time of Quarantine here in Montreal and Sound On InstaReadings Series that's happening in Vancouver or really over Instagram. And large scale initiatives like Canada Performs have launched for musicians and other performing artists including now, thanks to Margaret Atwood, writers whose shows or book tours have been cancelled in the spring or summer. Unlike the streaming that so often is done without compensation to the artist, artists selected for Canada Performs will be paid $1,000 for their at-home performance to be broadcast on the National Arts Centre's Facebook page. And yes, they do perform from their own home for us, the collective we, to tune in from our homes and listen together.
00:58:36
Katherine McLeod:
But as collective acts of singing and of listening draw us to our balconies and our computer screens, we can also find ourselves not feeling like joining in. With all of the possibilities for tuning into live streams, we can feel overwhelmed amid searching for something meaningful to listen to. [End Music: Gentle Instrumental] Back in the first week when everything was changing, I remembered feeling relieved that people like Isabella and rob were creating online readings, but I also remember feeling that I didn't have the concentration to sit down and listen. And I remember thinking that when I feel more focused, or really when I feel a bit better, then I look forward to listening. When you don't feel like listening that says something about how you're feeling. When you ask someone how they are listening and if that's changed, you're really asking them how they're doing.
00:59:33
Jason Camlot:
Hey, let's try that out. Hey Katherine, how are you listening?
00:59:37
Katherine McLeod:
I'm listening...fine, thanks. How are you listening, Jason?
00:59:42
Jason Camlot:
I'm listening pretty well. Thanks for asking. But let me ask you this. How are you really listening, Katherine?
00:59:50
Katherine McLeod:
Well, Jason, how am I really listening? [Sighs] As much as we try to replicate the social, what we manage to produce within these digital environments is a version of the social that is both entirely real and entirely unreachable. We hear in it both closeness and distance and that is affecting. As much as we might try to listen to something that brings back the feeling of the social and the togetherness of before, we are beginning to face the reality of this change and what this change feels like and sounds like. We are listening differently now. Here. Here. Here.
01:00:34
Music:
[Slightly Distorted Synthetic Drum and Piano Instrumental]
01:01:00
Natalie Lim:
Hello from my kitchen! Thank you to Isabella and the whole Dead Poets Reading team for putting together this virtual reading. I'm really excited to be a part of it even though I'm bummed that we can't see people in person this weekend, but we're gonna hang out for like ten minutes, I'm gonna read some poetry, I got some water, it's gonna be a good time.
01:01:29
Hannah McGregor:
SpokenWeb _is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod of Concordia University and our podcast project manager is Stacey Copeland. A special thank you to Oana Avasilichioaei , Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, Arjun Basu, Naomi Charron, Alexei Perry Cox, Nisha Coleman, Klara du Plessis, Ian Ferrier, Priscilla Joly, rob mclennan , Heather Pepper, Lindsay Presswell , Deanna Radford, Kian Vaziri-Tehrani, Brian Vass, and Isabella Wang for their contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the _SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there. We'll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.