エピソード

  • From Hal to Siri: How Computers Learned to Speak
    2025/05/19
    Today we learn how computers learned to talk with Benjamin Lindquist, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University’s Science in Human Culture program. Ben is the author “The Art of Text to Speech,” which recently appeared in Critical Inquiry, and he’s currently writing a history of text-to-speech computing. In this conversation, we explore: the fascinating backstory to HAL 9000, the speaking computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey 2001’s strong influence on computer science and the cultural reception of computers the weird technology of the first talking computers and their relationship to optical film soundtracks Louis Gerstman, the forgotten innovator who first made an IBM mainframe sing “Daisy Bell.” why the phonemic approach of Stephen Hawking’s voice didn’t make it into the voice of Siri the analog history of digital computing and the true differences between analog and digital Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies
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    54 分
  • Noise and Information in the Office
    2025/05/12
    Ever wonder who’s to blame for the noise and distraction of the open office? Our guest has answers. Joseph L. Clarke is a historian of art and architecture and an associate professor at the University of Toronto. His 2021 book Echo’s Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space won a 2022 CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Title. It’s a fascinating history of how architects have conceived of and manipulated the relationship between sound and space. His most recent publication is “Too Much Information: Noise and Communication in an Open Office.” In this episode we’ll talk about media theorist Marshall McLuhan and his architecturally inspired theory of acoustic space, which went on to have its own influence in the field of architecture. We’ll also dive deep into the history of the open plan office, the theories of acoustic communication that inspired it, the sonic disaster it became, and the new media technologies that were invented in response. If you’ve ever been driven to distraction by noise in a cubicle farm or open office and wondered how such a space came to be, this episode’s got answers! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies
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    1 時間 13 分
  • Robin Miles: Talking Books
    2025/05/05
    Today we bring you a masterclass in audiobook narration and acting with acclaimed actor, casting director, audiobook narrator and audiobook director, Robin Miles. Miles has narrated over 500 audiobooks, collecting numerous industry awards and, in 2017, was added to the Audible Narrator Hall of Fame. She’s the most recognizable voice in literary Afrofuturism, having interpreted books by Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemisin, and Nnedi Okorafor. Miles holds a BA and an MFA from Yale. She has taught young actors and narrators at conservatories across the country and she has an amazing talent for doing accents—something we really dig deep into on this podcast. In this conversation we talk about technique, the audiobook industry, and the politics of vocal representation. How do we avoid the misrepresentation of marginalized people on the one hand and vocal typecasting on the other? For our Patrons we have almost an hour of additional content, including our What’s Good segment where Robin unsurprisingly makes some really great book recommendations! If you want hear all the bonus content, just go to patreon.com/phantompower. Membership starts at just three dollars a month and helps pay the expenses of producing the show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies
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    1 時間 14 分
  • Radiophilia
    2025/04/28
    Today’s guest is Carolyn Birdsall, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. If you’re a scholar of sound or radio, you likely know her work, particularly her monograph Nazi Soundscapes (AUP, 2012) which was the recipient of the ASCA Book Award in 2013. Her new book, Radiophilia (Bloomsbury, 2023), examines the love of radio through history. It will be a great value to anyone–from novice to expert–who wants to understand radio studies and think about where it should go in the future. In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss Carolyn’s career and both of her books. We also get into the present state of radio and media studies, as well as the kind of skeptical orientation to media that tends to set sound studies scholars apart from many of their peers. And for our Patrons we’ll have Carolyn’s What’s Good segment, with something good to read, listen to, and do. You can join us at patreon.com/phantompower. Today’s show was edited by Matt Parker. Transcript and web content by Katelyn Phan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies
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    1 時間 11 分
  • Cosmic Visions in Sound
    2025/04/21
    Today we share a podcast episode on the visual epistemology of astronomy by our friends at The World According to Sound. What kind of knowledge do we really gain when we look at images from space? Longtime listeners to this show will remember The World According to Sound. As we referred to them two years ago, WATS is a team of two rogue audionauts who rebelled against the NPR mothership: Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. Tired of sound playing second fiddle to narrative on NPR, they launched a micro podcast that held one unique sound under the microscope for 90 seconds each episode. Later, WATS became much more ambitious, producing live sonic odysseys in 8-channel surround sound and live online sound journeys during the pandemic. Since then, Harnett and Hoff have embarked on another project. For the past couple of years, they have been partnering with different universities to translate humanities research into compelling sound-designed narrative podcasts. The first season of Ways of Knowing was produced in partnership with the University of Washington and it focused on different analytical methods and disciplines in the humanities, from close reading, deconstruction, and translational analysis, to black studies, material culture, and disability studies. The second season just wrapped up. It’s called Cosmic Visions and it’s produced in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and that’s what we’ll hear an episode from today. Just this week, they dropped the last episode of season two and now the entire series is available on The World According to Sound website. We wanted to draw your attention to this series because turning humanities research and sound art into a sonic narrative experience was the original mission of Phantom Power. We know that many of you are interested in this area of humanities podcasting as well, so if you’re not already a fan of Chris and Sam’s work, check it out. We also wanted to share this particular episode because it also provides one answer to a tricky question: How do you do a sonic explication of something that is entirely visual? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies
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    24 分
  • Your Devotee in Rags
    2025/04/15
    NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with cultural icons, Anne Waldman (The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment) and Andrew Whiteman (Broken Social Scene) who have collaborated to create Your Devotee in Rags—a metamorphic sonic poetry LP released by Siren Recordings in 2025 and is available from Spotify. The conversation starts with a discussion of Anne’s epic, The Iovis Trilogy (Coffee House Press, 2011). Published for the first time in its entirety, this major epic poem assures Anne Waldman’s place in the pantheon of contemporary poetry. The Iovis Trilogy, Waldman’s monumental feminist epic, traverses epochs, cultures, and genres to create a visionary call to poetic arms. Iovis details the misdeeds of the Patriarch, and with a fierce imagination queries and subverts his warmongering. All of Waldman’s themes come into focus—friendship, motherhood, politics, and Buddhist wisdom. This is epic poetry that goes beyond the old injunction “to include history”—its effort is to change history. Your Devotee in Rags is a missive to this age of patriarchal power, its songs and poems are designed to specifically confront that power and hold it to account. Taking such activist inspiration from musicians like Lido Pimienta and Tanya Tagaaq, musically YDIR blends acoustic and electronic genres, waltzes, laments, and Pauls Boutique-era Beastie Boys mash-ups all with the intent of creating a new artistic headspace: sonic poetry. The cultural direction is forward, the earbuds open up the stereo field, listening to YDIR is, in a word, empowering. More about Your Devotee in Rags: Your Devotee in Rags is a sonic poetry collaboration between Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman; an act of desire and metamorphosis expanding the performative vision of being at the horizon of new experience, stripped down, exploring the turf, through poetry and spiritual yearning. Anne says: “Wizard Hal Willner would be proud of us companions in the vibrational matrix. Comrades in a studio of subtle suspense, and where were we headed? A magnificent voyage! Tender, rugged, true. I met Andrew Whiteman, genius player, composer, scholar, in one of Hal’s unpredictable alchemical laboratories. We instantly bonded as mavens of poetry and its attendant orality, dedicated to the passion of epic life that is the source of this album, the 1000 plus pages of the feminist canto: Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment; passages plucked to be re-imagined in ambient explosive word-sound. On the Yantzse, in a strip club, a maelstrom of memory honoring precursor male poets, dressed in the rags of Celtic hags, so much more as mendicant, witty siren, compassionate lover, exploding empires of patriarchy and war. A kind of mythic hospitality.” Andrew says: “It was filmmaker Ron Mann and producer Hal Wilner who showed me the way. Hal was my guiding presence—whip smart, funny, gentle, empathic. This album is dedicated to him.” More about Anne Waldman: Anne Waldman is a living legend. Poet, performer, professor, editor, cultural activist, grandmother, and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Former director of the Poetry Project. Tireless author of over 40 books, her trademark energy coils ever outward, always seeking to reveal the four-fold vision that we have largely lost. More about Andrew Whiteman: Andrew Whiteman is a musician and mythopoetics scholar from Montreal, Canada. He writes and performs in Broken Social Scene, Apostle of Hustle, AroarA, and Poets’ Workout Sound System. He is a co-founder of Siren Recordings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies
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    29 分
  • Tinnitus Stories
    2025/04/14
    Today Mack talks about one of his oldest companions, the tinnitus that lives rent-free in his head. Tinnitus can be annoying, for sure–and for some people it’s much worse than annoying–but it also has a lot to say of interest, if we’re willing to listen: “Tinnitus has been my guide in sound studies, my Virgil, leading me through a shadow world of sound. It’s taught me how high the stakes can be when it comes to the perception and control of sound and it’s given me new ways to think about how and why we use media devices.” Today we’ll learn the basics of tinnitus and hear some tinnitus stories–everyone with tinnitus has one and these stories can teach us a lot about sound and the self. Maybe tinnitus has earned that rent-free headspace, after all. Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood. Music is by Joel Styzens. The composition “A Sharp” appears on his album Relax Your Ears. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies
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    42 分
  • Warren Zanes: Rockstar Biographer
    2025/04/07
    Warren Zanes is a “rockstar biographer” in more ways than one: he has experienced life as a rockstar, a biographer, and a biographer of rockstars. When Mack first met Warren in New Orleans sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, Zanes was then emerging from the wreckage of meteoric success. He’d been the teenage guitarist in critically acclaimed band The Del Fuegos, who briefly broke into the national popular consciousness—and then just plain broke up. But in the years since, Zanes remade himself into one of our most erudite and entertaining public scholars of popular music. Among other things, he’s been Vice President of Education and Public Programs at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a consulting producer on the Oscar-winning film Twenty Feet from Stardom, a producer on the Grammy-nominated PBS/Soundbreaking series, and he conducted interviews for Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison documentary. All while keeping up a solo recording career with collaborators such as the Dust Brothers. Warren’s books include the first volume in the celebrated 33 1/3 Series, Dusty in Memphis; Petty: The Biography and Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records. His latest book is called Deliver Me from Nowhere. On its face, it’s a book about the making of Bruce Springsteen’s classic lo-fi album Nebraska. But it’s also about sound technology, musicianship teetering in a moment between the analog and digital eras, what it means to be in a band, and the relationship between the four-track cassette recorder and social alienation in Reagan era. In this interview, Warren talks about his journey, the recent book, his craft as a writer, and—as part of our mini-theme this season on audiobooks—the process of narrating his own audiobooks and why he does so. And for our Patrons we’ll have Warren’s What’s Good segment, with something good to read, listen to, and do. You can join us at patreon.com/phantompower. Today’s show was edited by Nisso Sacha and Mack Hagood. Transcript and web content by Katelyn Phan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies
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    1 時間 16 分