Jonathan Sterne, “Diminished Vocalities: On Prostheses and Abilities”

[Music] [Applause] [Music] well why don't we get started um it's wonderful to see um all the attendees tonight and um i'm just gonna get started um tonight we are very pleased to have jonathan stern whom many of you know um teaches in the department of art history and communication studies at mcgill university um he is the author of diminished faculties of political phenomenology of impairment from which he'll be drawing tonight um mp3 the meaning of a format the audible past cultural origins of sound reproduction and numerous articles on media technologies and the politics of culture he is also editor of the sound studies reader and co-editor of the participatory condition in the digital age with co-author mara mills he is working on tuning time histories of sound and speed hopefully we'll be able to talk a bit about that in the q a and he has a new project cooking on artificial intelligence and culture so without further delay i'm going to hand things over to jonathan welcome okay uh can everybody hear me okay just making sure okay uh thank you vivek uh i want to thank andrew too for setting me up and remembering to ask about my access needs that was a nice touch um you're gonna get a talk in three parts today originally i was gonna make you one long movie and then i was gonna chat with people in the chat window the whole time and it was gonna be great but it totally didn't work so there's a movie for 11 and a half minutes at the end the middle part is me doing talking torso for you and the first part is alas torture by powerpoint or apple keynote in this case so here we are should be able to see this so i'm going to give you an overview of the book we're going to do a deep dive into one of the chapters and then we're going to do a sort of drive through of the third chapter to mix my metaphors i want to begin um with a uh land acknowledgement and in this case also a technological acknowledgement sorry for my tweaking here i'm just trying to get the pictures out of the way of the text so while zoom's the technical custodian custodian of the platform on which were gathered today were no less occupants of the multiple territories on which were all physically located i am speaking to you from the unseated territory of jojage now known as montreal the ghananyanka aha sorry nation are the traditional custodians of these lands and waters although learning the history of where you are is an ongoing process a good starting place might be the website nativeland.ca but wait there's more the platform we're gathered on today is provided by zoom a publicly traded company valued at about a 117 billion dollars as of the end of 2020. zum's headquarters are located on a territory and when it comes to sustainability communal living and giving gifts to passengers by the alone a have more to offer than another corporation the olani's horizontal society might inspire different emergent models of peer-to-peer networking in the pandemic than we're enacting here on zoom so as we meet today let's reflect on the unfinished work of restitution justice and reparation so i'm going to tell you a little bit about the book that i just finished copy edits on and that's coming out december 2021 the title is diminished faculty is a political phenomenology of impairment a subtitle that is sure to keep it out of airport bookstores and i also like before i get too far i can't actually see that many people's um that many people as i'm talking but you should feel free to stretch to look up look down look around turn off your video whatever's comfortable for you as we're going through this talk so the book is a weird book for me i mean i guess all my books are weird in some way but this one is also highly personal in 2009 i discovered that or rather my doctors discovered that i had a very aggressive case of papillary thyroid cancer they might write recurrent laryngeal nerve that means that one of my vocal cords is paralyzed this one so instead of going like this which is what they did before 2009 and what normal vocal cords do now they work like this so it is harder for me to talk and to swallow i do get plastic surgery every 18 months or so on the paralyzed one to plump it up you'll see a short video clip of from one of those surgeries later on but of course this has profoundly affected my voice now that may or may not be audible to you because my vocal disability is not always an audible disability in fact sometimes when my voice is in the worst condition it sounds the best in a sort of like tom waits meets lauren bacall after several packs of cigarettes kind of thing um so you know lots of friends said hey you've published two books on sound you should really write something about your voice this is harder than it uh seems um but this led me down a path i've been reading and thinking with disability studies for many years and it sort of led me down the path of uh working on and thinking about this book so um the chapters are as follows the first one is really an attempt to think about what it would mean to write about my voice which is to say uh it's me trying to resettle my accounts with phenomenology in the audible past i was quite dismissive of phenomenological approaches to experience but at the time i was also pretty unaware of all the feminist critical race and disability work in phenomenology and since the beginning of the 21st century there's much much more um and so that chapter is an attempt to think like what is it to do a phenomenology of a faculty when you're not in full control of it because most phenomenologies begin from the presupposition that the subject uh doing the phenomenologizing that's not a word but the subject doing the phenomenologizing is in control of the faculties and the experiences that they're describing um and so it is in some ways the most ponderous chapter uh because it's written in that sort of ponderous phenomenological voice but it's also got lots of good uh details of uh awkward social interactions and uh it also begins with me waking up on the surgical table so there's that uh chapter two is meet the dorka phone this is the darker phone oh yeah i forgot i have pictures um this is an illustration for chapter one uh done by uh lachlan jane my tumor was 7.5 centimeters one day we were sitting on the porch trying to figure out what what else is 77.5 centimeters and so uh lachlan uh very uh kindly helped helped me and us out with it uh and so that's in the book so chapter two is about the dorka phone that's gonna be what i talk about today so i won't say much about it right now except it's a personal voice amplifier i have had to oh and also it's dork with a d not bork with a b because voip has this thing where a certain consonants aren't distinguishable from one another so it's not pork when you think of bork think of chihuahuas when you think of dork think of my personal portable speech amplifier and this picture which is at my desk a few minutes ago is um what i'm calling the auto dorka phone which i'll talk about uh midway through the talk but you can see there's a microphone there on uh like a radio arm there's a pair of headphones just above my keyboard and then there's a blue object on my desk and i'm going to talk about those a little bit uh later on chapter 3 is written uh so chapter one and chapter two i really do talk about myself and then i just can't deal with it anymore so i more or less stop talking about myself chapter three is written as an imaginary exhibition uh we've even mapped it out for you so you can see here uh where the different exhibits and rooms are and the chapter is actually written as the text of an audio guide so even the detours through theory it says like press star for more information on the uh um ideology of vocal ability or for more history of the larynx or something like that so um it's also like very much a conceit but that chapter is about trying to think about different configurations of voice body and agency and i will show you some things from it i'll give you a little sample from the last part of my talk chapter four is about a normal impairment which is hearing impairment we and by by we i really mean me and the people at mit i don't know everybody who's attending the talk but at least the people on my screen live in a culture that's mostly designed for people who are a little bit hard of hearing this is uh from a work called constellations by the australian artist marco fusionato and it is designed to produce i think 120 decibels of sound when you hit a wall with a baseball bat and um it's not just things like constellations that produce this like huge amount of sound obviously concerts sporting events things like that we think about that but also airplanes and those high-powered hand dryers in tiled institutional bathrooms all of those produce very high volumes of sound which means in those spaces it's better to be a little hard of hearing than to not be a little hard of hearing and so in this chapter i really start looking at what a normal impairment is and what a sort of culturally preferred impairment is and so instead of talking in terms of hearing loss or hearing damage i use sort of the anthropological literature on body modification and scarification as my guide and so the chapter is called audio scarification and it's everything from loud noises to the historical origins of earplugs the final chapter is called there isn't there are never enough spoons uh it is named for an idea from the writer christina mizeron miserandino who coined the spoon theory uh which is a way of sort of quantifying one's own fatigue so the chapter begins as a sort of unpacking of this idea of fatigue as depletion most concepts of fatigue are concepts of a subject depleted of energy and it ends with an attempt at a non-depletionist account of fatigue and this is interesting and important because in disability theory there are so many critiques of writing about impairment and disability as something that is less than uh that which is that which is non-impaired or non-disabled but when we get to fatigue even in the disability literature it is treated mostly as an absence or a depletion uh the final chapter or the conclusion then is an instruction manual for using impairment theory it's illustrated by the artist darshan hewitt this is one of her illustrations uh and um i guess that's all i'll say about it no one ever reads the instruction manual but you might want to read this one okay that is my powerpoint i'm going to stop sharing now now you will see my rather large head now we're going to do a deep dive into chapter 2 which is entitled meet the dork of phone so this is a darker phone it's basically a transistor radio with no radio attached to a small wearable microphone that lives inside a vinyl pouch and you can't really see it here but it has fake cow skin uh embossing it can be hung around my neck its real name is the spokeman personal voice amplifier other devices can be clipped to a belt or built in the belts themselves or can be laid out on the table i own two spokemen's or do you call them spokesmen no that's two dork of phones each of which cost me about three hundred dollars total though it seems prices have dropped since i purchased the last one in 2012.

i've had both my units repaired more than once and they're clearly not designed for the abuse i inflict on them i throw them around accidentally but i do it uh they live in backpacks they travel all over the world with me they've been operated at high altitude and yet they're also surprisingly hearty um and in some ways even though part of me says this is just a transistor without a radio without a radio that i could pick up for five bucks at the thrift store when i look inside is actually a marvel of engineering of miniaturization and of durability now the name spokeman is either a misuse of spokesman like a mistranslation or more likely an unsuccessful riff on walkman which it must be noted was not named listen man or listen man probably for good reason the spokeman is one example in a genre of voice amplifiers a genre without a shared name or a defining brand like kleenex or xerox but whose names all point to this weird gray area of voice and techne that it occupies speech amplifier voice amplifier personal public address system personal voice amplifier chatter vox amplivox sound pocket xavox zowatik voice buddy sound buddy zygo but unlike the walkman they don't signify mastery or coolness they represent the social oddity of personal voice amplification itself in one way it shouldn't be odd at all voices are amplified all the time and just think of us now doing our academic business meeting as we are gathering as we are over zoom everyone is using microphones and speakers in fact my dork iphone right now is turned off i'll turn it on for a second you can hear it amplifies my voice a bit which reduces my vocal strain i never use my darker phone on zoom i'll have things to say about zoom a little bit later um so this is purely uh for the benefit of this talk uh in real life i haven't had an occasion to use this since before march 2020 but still i wrote about the darker film so let me tell you about it public address systems microphones speakers are common objects all over the world and in many places it's a daily experience to be serenaded by a host of voices meant to refer to distant or absent bodies contemporary audio culture in most of the world now is speaker culture and here speaker refers to the technical devices not the people now even though my dorka phone is technically the same thing as a pa system just smaller it's socially set apart its oddity is socially produced it is a design object you might expect to fall under the category of audio wearables mp3 players earbuds smartphones and now even boom boxes thanks to lighter bad batteries and other advances but categorically it falls on the side of a prosthesis artificial limbs insulin pumps crutches if they had to if you have to experience the dorkophone as a prosthetic i wish they were more like eyeglasses once a stigmatizing object and now a fashion accessory instead dorkaphones share a set of cultural and technical problems with hearing aids and cochlear implants hearing aids introduced issues of portability and miniaturization in microelectronics while generations of users have had to negotiate their relationship among social appearance stigma and their own needs and desires for the technology and mara mills has written about this in jaipur verdi's new book um hearing happiness also deals with uh the history of hearing aids and deafness cures so the dorica phone is a prosthesis it is an assistive technology and one of the standard arguments in disability studies most recently and eloquently made by sarah hendren is that assistive in front of technology is actually a redundant term because all technologies are designed to assist so what an assistive technology does it marks the person who is visibly using it as in need of assistance in other words the technology itself is in some ways disabling socially even as it is assistive processionally when a space makes demands and people have to make demands back it marks them as different irrespective of their self concept so i can imagine myself as impaired as disabled or non-disabled and the prosthesis does its semiotic work on my body in terms of the perceptions of others hegel and his followers explained that identification's not just an individual choice the politics and phenomenology of disability have an irreducible relationship to the politics of recognition and therefore also to the politics of a prosthesis the simple choice of where to position the speaker on my body raises the questions of under what conditions a ver person has a voice to speak with and from where it truly comes the darker phone speaker cannot be positioned over the mouth and yet the mouth is supposed to be the visual and sonic point of origin of the voice though even though technically mouse are just modulators in wearing a darker phone suddenly my voice is somewhere it's not supposed to be and my mouth is not doing something it's supposed to do it thus creates a distance between me and my voice even though there's already one and the mic and my on my head in the box hanging from my neck call attention to this distance destabilizing ideologies that naturalize voice and speech it performs a distance for others who see and hear me who are dealt then with a rich hand of philosophical questions about voice intention and embodiment which they can either confront or work to ignore so this simple prohibition do not hide your mouth with a prosthesis when speaking initiates one of the most demanding conceptual exercises in voice theory that is because of this close visual coupling between mouth and voice which i'm going to call oral voice the oral voice is everywhere in writing about voices and in vocal iconography and while clearly sorry looking at the wrong place it begins from a normative voice and a normative mouth i can't imagine contemporary work that engages with coloniality sexuality gender race uh or any other area from the standpoint of a positionless writer performing a kind of god trick in donna haraway's term and yet much writing about the voice outside of voice studies still treats the voice uh from a position of seeing from nowhere and a hearing from them everywhere the dorica phone's dorkiness is not an accident prosthetic fashion and by extension the user's emotional relationship with the device has often been the last concern for designers and there's this booming literature now on disability and design in addition to the hindrance book that i mentioned and the verdi book i read i've i'm mentioned uh amy hamray bess williamson and grand palm have also written excellent things um on disability in the politics of design the dork of phone follows that sort of prosthetic politics as vivian subchak has written the fluctuating line between the and my prosthesis makes her all sorts of give and take around meaning in her case and she's talking about a uh an artificial leg she says their significant figural movement from mentonomy to synecdoche from thou prosthetic viewed abstractly to my prosthetic leaning up against the wall near my bed in the morning to my leg which works with uh the other one and enables me to walk in my case the darker phone assimilates into my voice in action so let's follow subject's arrow figuration the voice is an impossible abstraction my dork-a-phone charging on my desk my voice what makes the dork-a-phone noticeable and sometimes uncanny is its proximity to the physical generation of sound in my diaphragm throat and mouth this is its defining technocultural feature it audibly invisibly marks my vocal system as a need of supplementation when it's supposed to be self-sufficient and that's my doorbell which i'm not answering in the middle of a talk um uh and it's worth uh um pointing out that this uh um idea of prosthesis is still getting a lot of play in media theory right so that meteor prosthetic in inherently in some way um but that is to metaphorize prosthesis and in mcluhan's original uh discussion of it it's quite he he metaphorizes directly he says media like our prosthetic or they amputate the body but he's not actually talking about actual amputation or amputees so disability becomes a sort of ableist metaphor the imagination the ableist imagination of what amputation might be like undergirds that theory and i think the same might be said for prosthetic theories of writing in derrida or prosthetic theories of technology and the hand in stigler but that's a that's a discussion uh for the q a if that's something you're interested in so i think it's good to sort of cordon off this category of the prosthetic as a particular kind of technology tied to a particular kind of political situation rather than as a sort of generalized metaphor for understanding media so the dork of phone does this sort of techno vocal doubling if we're going to riff if we're going to mention derrida we could call it dorco phone a leg and voice prosthesis present themselves differently as subjects we tend to adjust to them differently and legs and voices represent different things but of course the metaphoric politics in the metaphoric process is related so i'll give you one example an arrival of one of our house parties in 2011 looked me up and down right after i opened the door to greet him smiles points and asks what the is that i offered the shortest explanation i could muster glasses for my vocal cords cane for my voice works well too and within minutes we were talking like nothing was out of the ordinary right so there's that sort of shock and then assimilation which is something that rosemary garland thompson has talked about uh with disability in the gays so once the social question the darker film presents is answered what the is that it retreats back into my voice it becomes part of me in the course of social interaction now i have more to say about dorka phones and prosthesis but i want to i want to talk to you a little bit uh from a section called of other dorkophones which is named of course for uh foucaults of other spaces um and i i've i've worked on some sort of experimental alternatives but now i want to talk about the setup uh that came with zoom because it actually it pertains to you even if you don't have a vocal impairment my confinement during covet has led to a voice amplification problem that's slightly different and it's related to hearing oneself speak when commentators reflect on zoom fatigue they tend to reflect on the problems of looking at other people or even looking at yourself all day but there's also a problem of hearing on a landline telephone the phone receiver plays back a little bit of your speech into your ear this feedback mechanism is important for people like me who are trying to avoid vocal strain put simply people tend to talk louder when they don't hear their own voices and it's while it's possible to unlearn this behavior it's difficult and i actually haven't successfully done it um and this is why when mobile phones were first a thing there were all these sort of commentary pieces and cartoons about people yelling into their phones mobile phones don't have this feature because it was either injured out engineered out as a non-necessity or presented some kind of obstacle and voice over internet over over internet protocol voip also doesn't have this which means skype zoom whatsapp messenger teams and all the rest do not feedback your voice into your ears so while i have no practical use for my dorka phone right now speaking to you the only way to get through many hours of video chats for work would be to construct an assembly of technologies and techniques for hearing myself speak i call this assemblage the auto dork of phone so that is the microphone the microphone arm and the headphones and then the blue device on my desk that i mentioned before basically what happens is it plays back my voice into my headphones as it goes into the computer so i can hear myself speak and so i can modulate my voice actually achieving this was somewhat difficult there's uh some tech support jokes in the article but i'm gonna are in the chapter but i'm gonna leave leave this story there so to wrap up the only adequate fear and i should say to wrap up this section before we move on to the movie which is the last part of the talk the only adequate theories of vocality begin from a founding disunity of people and voices and a founding understanding of voice that casts it in the plural there's a growing body of scholarship that begins from this premise you know i time amanda weidman merrill halper kathy meisel to name some places you could start your reading if you're curious about this for me and for anyone with an impaired voice this is a personal political and philosophical project all at once people are at all at best vocal operators those operations happen in a world suffused by the ideology of ability which says that ability is preferable to disability they're also suffused with the ideology of vocal ability where i operate a voice as if it were the carrier of my intent as if it were my soul and will spilling forward out of my mouth with my breath what i seek from any dork of phone is a kind that's perfect what i seek from any darker phone is a kind of instrumental relationship a merger of subject and object where the articulation of body vocalization and device becomes just my voice in a moment of action as in any tool use this instrument instrumentality requires practice and work like a musician who bonds with some instruments but not others my problem with other darker phones is that i don't know if i can get to this state of instrumentality okay that is the talking torso part of the talk now and i'm gonna i made a video for you and so this will be the last uh 11 minutes of the talk and it's a little like uh introduction to some of the things you'll find in the imaginary exhibition uh of other localities here we go [Applause] did you hear that [Music] so i wanted to just share a few examples from the imaginary exhibition uh of the new vocalities that i thought would benefit from durational media her uh durational presentation this first one is nina ketchup durian's talking popcorn as you can see it handily explains itself [Music] check out that microphone [Music] there it is again [Music] tutorial [Music] so my favorite thing about this piece besides the just incredible amount of labor uh and uh the elaborate sort of rude goldberg machine to set this up is the degree to which um it shows that voice is a matter of reception and interpretation so one of the things cachadorian did is actually take those last words and play them for and show them to a cartographer a death duolla psychoanalyst sound theorist and a bunch of other experts to get their interpretations of it so not only is it this wonderful sort of dissolution of voice into signals and perception it's also um a sort of meditation on the centrality of interpreting when talking about what a voice is and how a voice works the other thing i really like about the piece is that microphone that mic is a sure sm57 which in the performance world is like the most ubiquitous vocal microphone on earth it is also the one one of the ones most well designed to take endless abuse and so an sm57 is the perfect thing that you want to expose to the heat and grease of a popcorn popper uh because it's a vocal mic not for rarefied studio situations but for everyday performance and perhaps the kinds of catastrophes that happen to technologies often in bars the second piece is uh listening in a portrait of charles gracer uh by the artist darren martin and as you can see from the image here it's actually a multi-modal work that's meant to be projected in three different places at once and then you're in a room and the sound sort of comes around you so it's even a bit of a reduction for me to present it to you in this two-dimensional film format but here you have voice and listening sort of distributed in very interesting ways right you have the text you have all the sound modulation you have human speech you have interpretation tied to speech and you have signing as well [Music] me yes wow [Music] [Music] well when i was teaching high school i already had three young kids in the house with my wife and me and i needed money and i enjoyed driving so i drove tank trucks i was driving for richfield finally and one sunday i took the truck out and i had to be back because there's a school function attitude of the evening this next piece by hodan yusuf is an experiment in deaf music video so it actually has no soundtrack and this was done uh with a group of people sort of organized by vero leduc at the university of quebeco morial yusuf is a deaf artist and performer and you can see uh it is very musical despite there's no sound here signing takes the place of vocality it takes a place of um an audible voice on an audible soundtrack uh and produces both sort of the expressive form as well as the sort of narrative form of the video [Music] and the last piece i'll share with you today is uh from the artist aaron g it's called the larynx series so what she did was take a medical photograph of a larynx turn it into vector like graphics and then lay them out flat and the reason she did that is because around the edges of the larynx there was there were lines that in the vector graphics form looked sort of like musical notation so she took it really seriously and you can see here she spreads out the lines around the edge she then writes musical notation over for the voice over the uh over over the vector graphics and then that is eventually turned into a musical score which you are hearing performed as i'm talking to you and there's uh there's one of the vocal parts that you're hearing performed so obviously there's much more in the exhibition i just wanted to give you a little taste of what you might encounter there hi and also show you ones that benefited from playback over time so speaking of time i'm definitely at the end of my talk here i want to thank you all for sticking around and listening and i really look forward to discussing this with you and again if you're interested in anything i've talked about not only do i recommend that you check out my book when it comes out but you check out the writing of the authors i've referenced throughout this talk thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] i'm out of speaking can you please listen louder [Music] all right thank you so much um i'm gonna open up thanks to questions um there we go yeah happy to discuss anything um so uh i'll be keeping an eye on the q a uh bar as well as um taking taking questions from on screen um whether you'd like to use your hands or the hand symbols i see tl wondering about the video lag uh i don't know if everybody had that that was not intentional that's just the crapness of streaming well it was perfect because it was the one where there was also the audio was coming through seamlessly so it was this wonderful juxtaposition of the two moments so perfect this is all about rupturing the audio visual contract yeah well it did remind me a lot of old eno looping stuff as well so it caught my ear good um well i'll start with a question just picking up on on one uh one thing that you mentioned in passing and that is the um the sort of more recent move to uh in design in terms of applying new design principles to [Music] prostheses to different um the different kinds of devices that are used by various different people and i'm just curious to hear a little bit more about that about sort of both the the actual design process and and the kind of um i guess the the impetus behind it who who is involved in um in just designing new new forms of prosthesis and [Music] sure well um this is part of a bigger movement called participatory design and the basic idea is that you shouldn't design stuff for people without their input which sounds like incredibly obvious but it is designed for disability has not really been a principle until pretty recently so um uh so designers in the last couple decades have started working with people with disabilities and also thinking more seriously about um prostheses and other technology assistive technologies as design objects whereas before they were generally thought of more in functional ways part of this might also be like you know they were being presented as medical technology in the us they were being presented to the insurance industry uh for for coverage so you certainly want them wouldn't want to look like you're enjoying it or having any fun with it like that's always bad for the protestant ethic of uh reimbursement but um but yeah the idea the idea behind it is simply the um on one so for one uh you know if you're designing something for someone they ought to be involved and two the design for disability really pushes the edges of design and that's really a central theme in in all four of the design books i mentioned two of them are sort of history and two are much more contemporary but what they all have in common is showing the ways the disability reveals aspects of design that are limiting not just for people with disabilities but for everyone and also pushes the edges of what's possible in design thinking and design theory so like the classic examples for those of you that don't read in disability studies are things like the curb cut which um activists uh in wheelchairs most notably the rolling crips in in berkeley had to fight for but of course are useful to people not just in wheelchairs but if you've got a granny cart coming from the supermarket or for that matter of double bass with a wheel on it uh or a rollerboard suitcase or pick your pick your example another would be closed captioning which is a fight we're having right now um in terms of online media uh and zoom and things like that um closed captioning not uh available it's seen as just a minority interest but of course today closed captioning i'm not that i've been to any of these places in the last year but health clubs airports bars any places where looking at you might not actually want to listen to what's on the screen but you might want to know what's being said with closed captioning for zoom there's actually an additional sort of political dimension which is that it's done by otter.ai and this is something i'm writing about with one of my students otter um basically you know he uses machine learning um to to uh try to caption and it's it's better than anything that i've seen that's come before other than actual human beings doing it and of course human beings will always give you better captioning and at least for the time being um but otters user agreement's very interesting because what they say is well we don't own your speech we don't own the content of what you're what you say but they do feature extraction they do voice printing right so in a way the minute you get uploaded into that world data are being generated about you and you're being voice printed so that's a great example of also the conflict between um design for disability and the politics of access and um sort of other kinds of capitalist enterprises that uh might be i mean there isn't a good word for this in my disability class we call it washing like green washing where it's this uh uh it's being presented as uh maura mills calls it the assisted pretext or it's being presented as useful for uh people with disabilities but it also has this other economic or political function so those are some of the things about design and disability my dork of phone is clearly not an example of design uh for disability however i have been working with an artist alexis immanuelof uh you can go to her website luthery postmodern um and she has been working on she does uh these giant sort of panel based speakers so instead of having like a magnet and a cone like a normal speaker does it's all a single board and so she's been building the these based on wood panels we did one experimental one a few years back but the batteries were too heavy but advances in battery technology have actually allowed the creation of a much more uh a lighter and more fashionable dorka phone that working on trial when there's an occasion to do it will you still call it a dorkathon when it doesn't [Music] thanks for such a interesting talk it was really cool um i i really love the the point you made about um kind of rethinking phenomenology and and sort of i don't know revisiting that approach and and then your your own writing and sort of uh yeah a more personal voice at points point so i just i was just curious if you had any other kind of meta reflections on on writing phenomenology in your own experience i don't very very open-ended but thanks well i'm definitely not planning to do it in everything i write for the rest of my career um i don't know it's really like i you know part of me doesn't like putting myself on i'm already putting myself on display when i tell you what i think about other people it's worse when i'm telling you what i think about something happening with myself but i think the grand con of phenomenology uh especially like the husserl heidegger and even marilu ponte although he's better and he's the one that the feminists tend to go back to um the grand con is that you can you're in a position to like abstract your subjectivity from your senses i mean the other thing i didn't get into this in the talk but i spent a lot of time in the book thinking about impairment as a sort of very normal though not universal condition um and the degree to which it affects things like the simple act of description right so when scholars describe something and you could think this ethnographically you can think of it in literary criticism in film theory and historical musicology in history and architecture and art history like pick your discipline in every case when an author gives a description we are to believe that the author is in command of their faculties now that's part of the academic game right we're trying to convince each other that we're smart that's authorial ethos you want that at the same time analytically like if you're really thinking seriously about senses and faculties from a disability perspective you cannot have that assumption and disability studies itself hasn't fully reckoned with this i mean there are writers who do this really well uh allison kaifer does this really good job in um um uh feminist queer trip where she sort of interrupts her discourse to sort of say well actually like even i can't live up to this intellectual ideal that i've set up but i think it's a really good challenge for theory and i also think it's a good challenge for theory in this moment where people are trying to figure out how to be positional but still talk beyond themselves and not just stand here and say like you know as a white male in montreal with these disabilities blah blah blah like how do you how do you and so it's a it's a question of abstraction and also a question of like the more concrete the description is in a way the more generalizable it could be because you know the position it's coming from uh and so for me this whole book it was very much especially the first three chapters like and then the conclusion very much and a little bit elsewhere an experiment in writing um and trying to write a little differently i mean i think it probably still sounds like me whatever that is you know the author function jonathan stern but i did try to write differently at times i'm having fun with it obviously with all the dork of phone puns and stuff and that's sort of the humor chapter um i don't know i'm if i mentioned this like originally i wanted the book to end with a cat throwing up on me but uh that but that ends the fatigue chapter uh and i couldn't figure out how to how to how to make that the end of the book and have a conclusion so i had to let that go so there is some like humor and i try to sort of self-deprecate but of course it's with a wink and a nod because i also want you to believe me and like take what i'm saying seriously so i don't know it's definitely like a sort of mid-career book in that way like you know i i can't believe that they're letting me do this kind of uh writing but it it was a good experience i don't know uh i don't know what it's going to mean for down the road like i i finished it and i'm like okay i really want to write about other people now i don't want to keep writing about myself um and i also think that's really important right now because there's a lot of other people and other things that need writing about so i see there are other questions so i will hold my discourse um i'll go to kelly and then i'll take a question from the q a bar and then back to nick thank you for the talk um i was interested in the comment you mentioned kind of from a media studies perspective how you know your the voice is kind of like your voice but versus the voice the kind of the mediated voice that goes through [Music] an object and then is still your voice and how they kind of merge sometimes and i guess i just i found that whole train of thought very interesting but i didn't quite know how to think about it and i was wondering if you could kind of expand on how you think about that for sure and i actually do in the book i mean one of the you know it's always tempting to start a talk with a lot of caveats by the way thank you for the great question and thank you tl for the great question and also thank you vivek for the great question i need to say thank you more obviously um it's always a temptation to give lots of caveats but one of the things i gave up was a little bit of conceptual precision to try to be a little more engaging in the setting so this is the book might answer the question or am i not um okay so a couple basic things from sound studies any sound always has multiple causes like we're used to thinking of like a sound having one cause like you know the dog barks or porks um or the cat meows or i talk right but in fact even me talking like there's all these different causal dimensions right so we've got my larynx like pushing air up we've got the mouth modulating the sound the tongues tongues doing lots of work then the sound has to move through a medium right it's the old alien tagline in space no one can hear you scream because it's a vacuum and so the result is um to talk about any cause of a sound is already to to reduce it in a way i mean obviously you know if you're talking about intention like i the intending subject um produce this thing but not alone and not in full command of my own faculties and in speaking to you on my screen obviously in concert with this whole technical assemblage so okay part one sound has all these caught has multiple causalities part two is this thing i alluded to which i actually spend some time on in chapter three called the ideology of vocal ability so the ideology of ability to win come this term coined by tobin siebers and it's simply the idea that people would rather be have abilities preferable to disability we would rather people be able rather than disabled and like on one level intuitively that makes sense allison kaeper says even though i have these disabilities and don't want to give them up that doesn't mean i want to acquire others right so it's a it's also an affective relationship so it's a pretty expanded notion of ideology but it's this preference for ability over disability but also this assumption that a subject is defined by its abilities i mean and this could go all the way back to aristotle saying deaf people aren't people um so where was i going with that okay so the ideology of vocal ability is the belief in the voice as the carrier of subjective intention and agency and when it's metaphorized like give the people a voice or where protesters are taping over their mouths uh to like represent that they're being silenced that is and that's the ideology of focal ability at work right so it's about collapsing this multi-causal thing of voice into an intending subject and saying here's how it always works so what i'm trying to do in chapters two and three is really think through voices multi-causal as um contingently cited rather than organically cited in an intending subject or an intending body and as something that might even act in the world beyond the intentions of an intending subject right so like nina kacha durian's talking popcorn is not siri right no one is interacting with talking popcorn like no one's gonna make a movie like her about talking popcorn right it's not something that she's not trying to get you to have an emotional relationship with this thing in fact uh you can actually eat the popcorn that the exhibit is producing as it well i mean it's not installed anywhere right now and during covid probably don't share food but theoretically one could eat this popcorn and uh um so it's a completely different relationship than like a personal digital assistant or something like that and yet it's also this like rube goldberg machine of a voice right there's a there's a digital voice there's a decoding of popcorn into morse code right dots and dashes and pauses and then the morse code instructs the voice in speaking and it can be totally heard in different ways and this happens all the time where tone of voice i mean it's the same with facial expressions i was on a committee this winter um and the the chair kept saying jonathan you look concerned and it was just the sun in my eyes so it's like i had um i feel pardon the term uh resting zoom face and tone of voice is the same kind of thing right where it seems to be we treat it as expressive and as the result of a person's command of their abilities but it also might not and especially along linguistic contexts um when you're thinking about accents um nina i times working on this as well as um i'm forgetting your name i just saw talk of hers on the name will come to me when i talk about something else but accent is disability and uh um i think that this is another example of like the problem with connecting voice and intention so does that answer your question because if not i can try again yeah now that conceptual background is very helpful thank you thank you i'm going to take a question from the q a from one of our attendees uh who says thank you jonathan for the amazing presentation i'm interested in the metaphorization of disability and media studies that you mentioned in your opinion why is the disability prosthetic metaphor so sticky persistent persistent um what kind of advocacy do you see needed in order to make academia itself less oh boy well thank you anonymous attendee that's a great question um i want to see it so i'm just clicking over to answered while i'm answering it um why is it so sticky okay so there's a bunch of answers like one of the obvious and simple ones in sanctioned ignorance like what do people know about and what do people nod know about in a given field and what are you expected to be responsible to and not and that changes over time i mean we've been seeing that uh we've been seeing that change around indigeneity and around blackness over the last few years um in a lot of previously overwhelmingly white curricula feminists have been fighting this uh battle for generations with cannons um uh you know of academic literature and still in communication studies men are cited way more than women obviously i've benefited from this but i will i can still say it's a problem um so i you know i'd see part of it is just plain old sanctioned ignorance like how many people in media studies have taken a course on disability have thought about it critically if that's not their area and i'll give you an anecdote it's not just media studies so i uh learned i so i went to norbert weiner's archives looking for something at mit at the mit library if you go through his papers there's letter after letter after letter about disability and prosthesis on and on and on because he'd written because of his writing on cybernetics and sort of proto what we call robotics now and before mara mills who's my co-author for this uh tuning time book before she wrote about weiner and disability um he was all over history of science and science technology studies as his major historical figure and nobody had written about it even though these people had gone to the archives and these letters were right there in the face right so this is the ideology of ability discounting disability even when it's right there in front of you um you know and i mean i can go on like sort of ideologically i mean then there's the persistence in media studies in general in in specific sorry media studies media studies is a particular interest in bodies very often it's the way bodies are organized into ensembles and ensembles with technology and so um you know and in post-humanism there's a lot of interest in questions of sort of augmentation or you could go back to airways cyborg theory which she herself now has sort of questioned in different ways in the in the later work on animals and so in those cases um i think if you're not educated about ableism prosthesis is a super exciting metaphor because it's just extending the body man and it's modifying the body and changing the body and those are all good things right like i i like insulin pumps i like dorka phones even though i make fun of them i like artificial limbs i like artificial larynxes like all those things are good um but prosthetic technology when understood socially when understood i think correctly through the lens of power relations or in concert with talking about power relations is not the same thing as somebody who's not coded as disabled by their technology right it's also not the same thing by other technologies that cause revulsion like the google glass slash glasshole phenomenon right which is a kind of discounting of the wearer but that's different than a certain ableist discounting so my prescription for media studies would be you know people should learn it's not that everybody needs to study disability but people should learn about disability just as they should learn um about indigeneity just as they should learn about race and sexuality and gender and age um as one of the things you should just know a little bit about whether you do it or not uh i think that would be that would be really good and really helpful um as far as making academia itself less ableist that's a huge job right so right now there's this whole problem as campuses are hoping to come back in the fall and many faculty are being asked to go through what's called biocertification uh which is essentially i mean it's what a lot of professors do to their students right you missed the test while i need to see a doctor's note so now in order to have an excuse for like a fairly minor bureaucratic blip this person has to go and medicalize themselves right in order to uh have institutional legitimacy right so biocertification is problematic because of access to health care because certain illnesses themselves are stigma stigmatized um i just taught this great film called unrest by the filmmaker jen brea you can find it on vimeo which is documentary on chronic fatigue syndrome that's still uh not very well understood um and then you know universities are you know at mcgill my favorite example i would always take my students to see this there's actually a door with an automatic door opener right so it's great for people with wheelchairs to go outside and then no matter which direction you go there were stairs so compliance culture is also a problem where the like intent of the thing doesn't work with the bureaucratic structures and the people operating within them so it'll take a lot of work to make academia less ableist i do a lot of things personally in my own classrooms like even just saying uh in a zoom meeting you know it's okay to stim it's okay to look around it's okay to inhabit your body i mean we're all stuck in our homes anyway like i've got a unicorn behind me like clearly there's a there's there's a lot more flexibility uh and hopefully we can hold on to that as we move back into collective spaces so thank you for that question i'm going to try to be quicker so more people can ask questions i'm going to go to nick and then will in chat and then back to mike so nick yes thank you vivek and thanks jonathan for your talk and for this discussion which is great i actually have a question about prosthesis as it relates to voice and to telepresence and teleconference that isn't directly about disability it's about how people use different types of prostheses to evade surveillance um and so people do this we know with uh for instance face paintings um that might you know attempt to avoid face recognition i'm wondering if people use vocal prostheses to try to avoid having the um types of uh data collection that you discussed um yeah yeah i totally get where you're going with this that's a great question not that i know of however if anyone would like to do an art project together trying to get that working uh see me after class it's a great idea i mean the classic thing is like the pitch shifter on the voice on the like no they're interviewing the person with the shadow you know they're in a shed like it's a new show and they're in the shadow and then they're voicing i'm thinking of a larry anderson performance where she's got uh she's got you know this that device that uh you know transforms her voice and she's yeah yeah no that's a i mean originally it was a vocoder i don't know what she's used to i don't know what she's using now and obviously like it's used to great aesthetic effect in um rnb like first vocoders and then auto tune so obviously like people do this but specifically to resist feature identification and voice id i think that's a very interesting question and a pro very interesting problem and i think there's all these other issues around audio surveillance that are just now starting to well they've been getting attention from sort of critical scholars but the work is just now starting to come out in fact i have on my desk there's a group in australia working on machine listening this is called eavesdropping a reader um and there's a group in germany that's about to publish a book as well unfortunately in german for those of you that don't speak german fortunately in german for those of you who only speak german um but uh but really i think it'd be an interesting art project to try to think of something similar to painting your face so your voice can't be voice printed and making it something that people could easily do in ambient environments thanks um so i'll go to a will who wrote in the chat i'm curious about the idea that you mentioned where people unintentionally speak louder when they can't hear their own voices or can't have their own voices fed back into their ears i may have missed it but is there a specific name for this phenomenon and why do people have a tendency to do this uh there probably is in the psychology literature i haven't bothered to learn it [Music] as for why people do it i mean you know speaking is a like ensemble of techniques of the body like any other and so i mean i think it has to do with hearing your own voice in your head right and when you're projecting it into a microphone or projecting it into something else uh when it's not giving you that same feedback that you get in a room for instance so it's worse with headphones on um although i use the headphones because they feed my voice back in um so i mean there's probably some like sort of naturalistic psychological explanation for it but i just think of it as like this isn't something that people are skilled for and over time people do learn to talk more quietly into mobile phones like it's not true that everybody that picks up a phone call in public now is yelling into the phone but it's also true that lots of people like you know on the bus or whatever or on the metro it is surprising uh how much you can hear those conversations by the way i see in the chat somebody typed the name for me it's puja rangan who's doing uh voice uh and accent uh as disability um and she's part she's got a she's uh got a collection she's co-editing with a couple other people that'll be out probably well given academic publishing problem let's give it two years but she gave a talk recently that might be online so definitely uh if you're interested in the politics of accent uh her and then nina i time also has a project going great let's go to mike and then um there's also a question that's been waiting in the q a hey i hope it's okay if i keep my camera off gonna go voice only uh it's extremely okay mike at first i was like wow you're sitting so far back from the camera that's awesome zoom power move no no um thank you for the talk i really love that um i want to ask what's kind of like the inverse of next question i'm curious to hear you talk more about kind of like the um potential for a statization and or and kind of the realm that you're describing you know one kind of parallel thing that comes to mind it's certainly not the same thing you're talking about but there's this kind of like famous case of this pop artist who recently passed away called sophie who uh was a trans artist who used pitch shifting technology i guess in some sense to sound more feminine but really the result was to sound kind of just otherworldly right so the idea of you can use the shifting sound or feminine maybe that's how it's often used in like the commercial recording industry but there's also some other thing that you can do with it there's kind of a new realm of possibility that gets opened up when you sort of start to engage that technology i don't know i i guess i'm just kind of curious especially about this book that talks about this exhibition and i don't know it's kind of a nebulous set of things that i'm asking but i am just curious about kind of the role of art and aesthetics here for sure thanks mike well so i would i mean in my own work i've actually totally parsed out the pitch shifting as like for the other book i'm doing with mauro so the last chapter he is on auto-tune and i think i saw kathryn provenzano's name in the audience who's writing a whole book on pitch correction and owen marshall also is working in this area um so just before i go off on it i just want to make sure i'm not pretending i'm sorry generous so the pitch shifting thing as an aesthetic practice is really well established um and the gendering is interesting because i can point back to patent applications in the 1930s dennis gabor who wrote who created a sort of analog time stretching device in the 1940s talking about pitch shifting is gendered so it's like very the high low thing is very much very much embedded and installed in sort of western vocal culture but by the 1970s that changes so uh one of the things um uh we're gonna talk about later later in the book is uh um pitch shifting like with eventide harmonizer uh parliament funkadelic did this to create the character knows devoid of funk um and you hear it later in prince you hear it in all sorts of edm vocals uh vocal samples and uh of course also uh very commonly uh in r b and hip-hop uh people are using uh pitch correction very creatively and i think that's great and now that many more performers are like intentionally gender bending than they were before um they this is an even more common practice the question for voice print identification so to connect it back to nick's question i don't think it's pitch i think it's stuff like formants and all the all the stuff that roland barr would have like bundled under grain so it's not just pitch but all these other aspects of the timbre of the voice and i think there's a lot of potential there and musicians and artists have played with formants and they played with other aspects of voice there used to be antares who made um auto-tune also made a product called throat which i don't think they make anymore but it actually had a visual graphic interface that like a you could make the throat bigger or smaller and it would change the sound of the voice but i'd be interested in being able to do that in real time in real space and not just a daw especially in relationship to this feature extraction so i think there's a lot of room for that all right there's a question in q a um and and thank you sasha for being uh very patient this is from sasha crawford holland i love the talk can you elaborate on the implications of mcluhan's prosthesis amputation metaphors being ableist yeah thanks sasha well i mean so mcluhan's your classic mid-century intellectual that writes in universalist terms but he was also somebody uh who didn't really believe in culture right so mcluhan uh treats the senses in terms of sense ratios he treats uh the human body is like this one universal thing he doesn't even really talk seriously about gender or race and when he does talk about race it's really really not good um so it's ableist in the sense that he assumes that you human beings all have the same sets of abilities and relations to those abilities which are then sort of ratioed i don't mean ratio in the twitter sense i mean put in ratios to one another so um the reason why they have the metaphor is ableist well first because using disability as a metaphor when you're not talking about disabled people is an ableist act just in the same way um that uh when people use um when people use race or gender uh to describe something that is not um about uh about sort of marginalized people so i think of like men using gendered insults designed for women for other men for instance that is like there's no non-sexist way to do that um also it's not very creative there's much better ways to insult men we can again see me after class if you want to talk uh but uh so it's ableist because it is disability it's something about us without us right one of the slogans of the disability rights movement is nothing about us without us and it is basically speaking of an absent population using stereotypes and the imagination of something let me give you one other exampl

2021-04-27 17:20

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