R. Murray Schafer recently passed away on August 14th 2021. If you’re someone who works with sound or enjoys sound art or experimental music--or you’ve just thrown around the word "soundscape"--you’ve probably engaged with his intellectual legacy. Schafer was one of Canada’s most influential avant-garde composers. He was also the creator of acoustic ecology, the founder of the World Soundscape Project, and the author of the classic book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. He brought a musician’s ear to the field of ecology and he brought an ecological perspective to music. And he bequeathed us a generative vocabulary for talking about and thinking about sound. This is the first of a two-part series on R. Murray Schafer. Next month, we speak with two of Schafer's critics--Mitchell Akiyama and Jonathan Sterne. But today, we speak with three of Schafer's associates to understand the person, his creative works, and his lasting impact on the study of sound: Ellen Waterman, ethnomusicologist, flutist, and Schafer expertHildegard Westerkamp, soundscape composer and member of the World Soundscape ProjectEric Leonardson, sound artist and President of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology Creative works heard on today's show: Listen, a short film on Schafer, directed by David New.Snowforms, R. Murray SchaferThe Greatest Show, R. Murray Schafer The Crown Of Ariadne, R. Murray SchaferWolf Music V: Nocturne, R. Murray SchaferLe Testament, Ezra PoundLoving, R. Murray SchaferBeneath the Forest Floor, Hildegard WesterkampMiniwanka, R. Murray Schafer Special thanks to Elisabeth Hodges for translation assistance, Alex Blue V for our outtro music, and Craig Eley for his dramatic turn as R. Murray Schafer. Today's show was produced and edited by Mack Hagood with additional editing by Ravi Krishnaswami.

Phantom Power

Ep. 29: R. Murray Schafer (1933-2021) Pt.1

Today, in honor of World Listening Day, we rebroadcast our story on renowned Australian sound composer, media artist and curator Lawrence English. This episode of gets deep into English’s own listening practices as an artist, specifically a technique he calls Relational Listening. In fact, as you’ll hear, he describes himself not as a sound maker but as a professional listener—that’s how central the act of listening is to his artistic practice. In particular he talks about his reworking of an important work in the fields of musique concrète and field recording, Presque Rien by Luc Ferrari, and the recent premiere of Wave Fields, his own 12-hour durational sound installation for sleepers at Burleigh Heads in Queensland as part of the Bleach* Festival. Lawrence is interested in the nature of listening and the capability of sound to occupy a body. Working across an eclectic array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work prompts questions of field, perception and memory. He investigates the politics of relation listening and perception, through live performance, field recordings and installation. The show includes extracts from the following tracks: Album: Cruel Optimism: "Hammering a Screw." Album: Wilderness of Mirrors: "Wilderness of Mirrors," "Wrapped in Skin." Album: Songs of the Living: "Trigona Carbonaria Hive Invasion, Brisbane Australia," "Cormorants Flocking At Dusk Amazon Brazil," "Various Chiroptera Samford Australia." Album: Ghost Towns: "Ghost Towns." Album: Kiri No Oto: "Soft Fuse." Luc Ferrari: Presque Rien.  Transcript [♪ ethereal music playing ♪] [CRIS CHEEK] This… is… Phantom Power. [COMPUTERIZED VOICE] Episode 4. [CRIS] On Listening In. [buzzing sounds fade in, and fade out as Cris begins to speak] [CRIS] The hive of the sugarbag bee, endemic to northeastern Australia. [loud music starts abruptly] The first notes of a piece called… [more loud notes] Hammering the Screw. [scratching noises and metallic noises begin] Found objects – a 44 gallon drum, a ghost town in far northern Australia. [scratching sounds] Just some small extracts from recordings made by today’s guest. [MACK HAGOOD] It’s Phantom Power, sounds about sound. That’s Cris Cheek, and I’m Mack Hagood. [LAWRENCE ENGLISH, pre-recorded] I’m Lawrence English, and I have been described as a professional listener. [bullfrog sounds fade in] Which does make me sound like a very second-rate therapist. [laughing] But, it is the kind of thing that I spend a lot of time doing in my everydays. There is a lot of listening that goes on, and I suppose in some respects you know, I’m increasingly interested in problematizing what that actually means, what our relationship is with that way of knowing the world around us. [music fades in, intense and somewhat sad] [MACK] So, Cris, I’m really excited that you got this interview with Lawrence English. [CRIS] Yeah! [MACK] I’m familiar with his work. I always thought of him as the Drone Guy, you know he does these really amazing and complex droning soundscapes, but it turns out, as you’ve just shown us by playing that material, that’s not even the half of what he does. [CRIS] Yeah, that’s right. He’s a highly contemporary model of the artist scholar, I think. A prolific composer – there’s at least 18 solo records and rising in the current millennium. He’s a sound art researcher, an artist, a fine photographer, and he supports a ton of other artists through his highly influential imprint, Room 40, based in eastern Australia, but genuinely servicing a global audience. Really interesting. [MACK] So, Cris, I know today you’re gonna walk us through some of Lawrence English’s recent work, including this recreation of a piece by a godfather of sound art, Luc Ferrari, and also some of his recent albums such as Cruel Optimism and Wilderness of Mirrors. But, what was it like talking with him? Did you find that there were any sorts of through lines to his work? [CRIS]

Ep. 28: “On Listening In” ft. Lawrence English (Re-cast)

What can sound technologies tell us about our relationship to media as a whole? This is one of the central questions in the research of Phantom Power's host, Mack Hagood. To find its answer, he studies devices that get little attention from media scholars: noise-cancelling headphones, white noise machines, apps that make nature sounds, tinnitus maskers--even musical pillows. The story these media tell is rather different from the standard narrative, in which media are conveyors of information and entertainment. In his book Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control, Mack argues that media are the way we control how--and how much--we let the world affect us. On Phantom Power, Mack has always focused on presenting the ideas of other scholars and sound artists. However, during our summer break we thought we'd share a piece by Mack that appeared in another podcast, the audio edition of Real Life, a razor-sharp magazine on digital culture. "Emotional Rescue" begins with the odd example of pillow-based audio technology to make the point that media are really about something more intimate than information: The cozy conflation of content and comfort... is not a recent digital development. Nor is it, I would argue, a quirky edge case of media use. In fact, this is what media are: tools for altering how the body feels and what it perceives, controlling our relationship to others and the world, enveloping ourselves, and even disappearing ourselves. Misunderstanding the true nature of our media use isn't merely of academic concern--it has had disastrous effects on our politics and social cohesion. The article was written for the Real Life website, then subsequently dropped in podcast form. Writing for the eye is quite different from writing for the ear, but podcast producer and narrator Britney Gil is amazing at elucidating written prose for the listener. If you listen to nonfiction audiobooks and/or want to hear a great narrator reading insightful takes on digital life, be sure to subscribe to Real Life: Audio Edition. "Emotional Rescue" by Mack Hagood: Original Article Original Podcast

Ep. 27: Emotional Rescue (Mack Hagood)

Today we present the first episode of Jacob Smith’s new eco-critical audiobook, Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves. In this audio-only book, Smith uses expert production to craft a wildly original argument about the relations between radio and bird migration. The rest of the book is available, free of charge, from The University of Michigan Press, but this introduction is a great standalone experience that we think Phantom Power listeners will delight in. It tells a truly unique cultural history of radio, describes important scientific discoveries about bird migration through interviews with key researchers, and continues exploring Smith's singular mode of ecocriticism, combining text-based scholarship with sound art, music, and audio storytelling.  Professor Jacob Smith is Director of the Masters in Sound Arts and Industries Program at Northwestern University and author of numerous books. He is a cultural historian focused on media and sound who never fails to come at his subject matter from an oblique and completely original angle. His first three books focused on the relationship between the media technologies that developed over the course of the twentieth century—the phonograph, radio, film, and TV—and the kinds of performance styles we have come to expect from performers. For example, his 2008 book Vocal Tracks  tackles questions such as how radio changed acting and why fake laugh tracks developed on television—and why we feel so weird about canned laughter.   In recent years, Jacob Smith’s work has changed in a couple of ways. Thematically, he took a hard turn towards environmental criticism. His 2015 book Eco-Sonic Media lays out an agenda for studying the negative environmental effects of media culture while also telling a strange alternate history of “green” sound technologies: hand-cranked gramophones with eco-friendly shellac records and needles sourced from cacti instead of diamonds. His next book maintained this eco-critical perspective while revolutionizing the format of the scholarly book. 2019’s ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene was a 10-part audiobook that mined golden age radio shows and sound art to explore the dawn of the Anthropocene era, in which humans emerged as the primary force affecting earth systems. In episode 12 of this podcast, we played an excerpt of that book and interviewed Jake about the process of crafting a book-length scholarly argument in sound by sampling sounds from other eras. Lightning Birds continues this Smith's work in this innovative vein.

Ep. 26: Lightning Birds (Jacob Smith)

Today’s guest, Kate Carr, is an accomplished sound artist and field recordist whose recent work grapples with issues of communication and longing—themes we can all relate to in the Covid era.  In part one of the show, we mark Phantom Power’s three-year anniversary and 25th episode. Mack does a little thinking out loud about the different kinds of audio work that we've featured over the past three years. The terminology and practices for audio work always seem to be in flux—and people can have completely different terms for similar kinds of work. Mack imagines a spectrum of sound work, from more materialist genres like musique concrete to more conceptual or idealist genres like the audiobook, which emphasize meaning over form. In the end, the spectrum eats its own tail—the material is always conceptual and the conceptual is always material. Sound is always both resonance and meaning and the two can never be completely teased apart. Signal and noise are one.  Episodes discussed: Ep. 20: What is Radio Art (Colin Black) Ep. 12: A Book Unbound (Jacob Smith) Ep. 15: Goth Diss (Anna M. Williams) In part two, we meet Kate Carr, an artist the critic Matthew Blackwell describes as a “sound essayist.” Since she began it in 2010, Kate Carr’s work as a musician and field recordist has taken her around the world, from her native Australia to a doctoral program at University of the Arts London. She’s been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wire, and Pitchfork. She also runs the field recording label Flaming Pines.  Since slightly before the pandemic, the theme of communication at a distance—always implicit in field recording—has taken center stage in her work. We examine three such pieces by Kate Carr. Each one explores how sound helps us communicate at a distance and how it comforts us in moments of loneliness: “Contact”—a meditation on sonic connection through radio, morse code, and digital technology. “Where to Begin”—a study of love letter writing, which Carr says has profound similarities with field recording. “For Some Odd Reason”—an exploration of the kinds of noise we came to miss during social distancing and the mediated ways we've tried to add it back.  Together, these three pieces—one from before the pandemic, one from its beginning, and one from its interminable middle—explore how earnestly we try to connect across distance—and how heightened these attempts have become over the past year. Huge thanks to our co-producer on this episode, Matthew Blackwell. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa and a freelance music writer. He writes and edits Tusk Is Better Than Rumours, a newsletter that covers the discographies of experimental musicians.  He is also a contributor to Tone Glow, a newsletter featuring interviews with experimental musicians. 

Ep. 25: For Some Odd Reason (Kate Carr)

Phantom Power's Amy Skjerseth brings us the story of perhaps the most famous vocal performance artist and avant-garde musician whose actual work doesn’t get the attention it deserves: Yoko Ono. Collaborator with the Fluxus group in the early 60s, creator of performances such as Cut Piece and her Bed In with John Lennon in the late 1960s, director of experimental films such as 1970’s Fly, and recording artist of experimental pop albums such as that Fly’s soundtrack... Despite this large body of work, her most famous role was that of wife to that guy in that band—a performance that made her the target of misogynous and racist criticism that persists to this day. As Amy points out, much of this criticism centered on the sound of Yoko Ono’s voice. Of course, as we’ve explored on this show before, listening to the other with a racist or sexist ear is nothing new. But in Ono’s case, this prejudicial listening is compounded by the fact that, years before the emergence of punk rock, she was pushing the boundaries of what was considered acceptable vocal expression for anyone, let alone a woman—moaning, wailing, chortling, and screaming. The vast majority of listeners immediately dismissed these sounds as a punchline. On today’s show, we’re going to actually listen. What is the purpose and meaning and effect of Ono’s vocal artistry? We’re exploring it in her recorded work, in her feminist and pacifist political agenda, and most of all, in her film Fly, in which she uses her voice to destroy boundaries between sound and touch, human and animal, self and other. This episode includes elements from an audio essay Amy published at [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies. Music by Yoko Ono, John Lennon, John Cage, Tanya Tagaq, and Graeme Gibson, as well as “Crickets, Birds, Summer Ambient” by Nikodemus Christian. You can hear most of the music again on this Phantom Power Spotify Playlist. Yoko Ono's film Fly is available on MUBI. The soundtrack has been reissued by Secretly Canadian. You can hear Yoko Ono's Twitter response to Trump (November 11, 2016) here.  

Ep. 24: Voice of Yoko (Amy Skjerseth on Yoko Ono)

What would happen if you took red state rural voters on a walk into the woods with left-wing environmental activists and experimental music fans? Our guest this episode knows the answer. BRIAN HARNETTY is a composer and an interdisciplinary artist using sound and listening to foster social change.  While Brian studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London, one of his teachers, Michael Finnissy, suggested he look for musical inspiration in his home state of Ohio. Brian took that advice and the result has been eight internationally acclaimed albums. Brian's music combines archival recordings of interviews and singing—often from the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives—with his original compositions.  For the past decade, Brian has focused on the myth, history, ecology, and economy of Shawnee, a small Appalachian town in Ohio. His 2019 album Shawnee, Ohio was praised by the BBC, the Wire, and named 2019 Underground Album of the Year by MOJO. The album engages with the social and environmental impacts felt by the town and nearby Wayne National Forest in their long history with extractive industries from timber to coal mining to fracking.  But Brian doesn’t just document Shawnee’s narrative—he intervenes in it. He’s an environmental activist of a gentle kind, one who gets area residents of different political stripes to walk in the woods together to listen—to one another and to the forest. All in service of protecting and healing the land. In this episode, we are  thrilled to present an audio documentary that Brian Harnetty has produced for Phantom Power about this quietly radical experiment, called Forest Listening Rooms. And afterwards I’ll speak to Brian about his project.  Learn more: Visit Brian Harnetty's studio in Ohio. Check out his Bandcamp page. Visit his website.

Ep. 23: Forest Listening Rooms (Brian Harnetty)

The Hey Robot board game Today, we’re playing with voice assistants and thinking about the role of voices in gaming with our guest, game designer and NYU professor Frank Lantz.  Over the past nightmare year of the coronavirus, many of us have been hunkered down, trying to figure out how to pass the time with our families. Board game sales on Amazon were up 4,000% percent in March, when Americans began sheltering in place. And, of course, we’ve also spent way more time interacting with digital technology. These two things have come together in a weird and delightful way in Lantz’s game Hey Robot.  Created by Lantz’s family-owned company Everybody House Games, Hey Robot is a guessing game you play with a group of friends—including your voice assistant or smart speaker. The premise is simple: Make Google Home or Alexa utter the words written in a deck of cards. The questions it raises are complex: What are these digital entities that many of us interact with daily? How have web searches and voice-based computing changed the way we talk? And what does this reveal about language itself?  Hey Robot is available in a free online Quarantine Edition that you can play remotely with your friends. The board game edition is available on Amazon. Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.  Fake Cumbia music by Mack Hagood.  Ambient music clip taken from Hiroshi Yoshimura’s album Green.

Ep. 22: HEY, ROBOT! (Frank Lantz)

Episode 21 presents a portrait of Iranian experimental composer Siavash Amini. His music, which moves seamlessly between contemplative ambience, menacing dissonance, and spacious melodicism, has been released on experimental imprints such as Umor Rex and Room40. His latest, A Mimesis of Nothingness, just came out on the Swiss label Hallow Ground.   Siavash tells host Mack Hagood that his entire life is based on an experiment and he doesn't yet know what its outcome will be. This episode traces the contours of that story, from his boyhood as a metalhead in a small Iranian port town to his role in the development of Tehran's lauded experimental music scene. Along the way, we drill down on the international and internal politics that add danger and difficulty to the life of this outspoken leftest composer.  Amini is forced to navigate not only the authoritarianism of Iranian government censorship, but also the authoritarianism of western tastemakers, who sometimes want him to make the "Middle Eastern music" they hear in their own heads. Steadfast in his individuality, Siavash makes sounds that resist these authorities--the defiant anthems of an imaginary land, population: one. Most of the music in this episode is by Siavash Amini--listen to it again in this Spotify playlist and check out this great introduction to his music on Bandcamp. This episode was edited by Mack Hagood.  

Ep. 21: A Life Based on an Experiment (Siavash Amini)

What is radio art? It’s a rather unfamiliar term in the United States, but in other countries, it’s a something of an artistic tradition. Today’s guest, Dr. Colin Black  is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning radio artist and composer. He speaks to us about his practice as a radio artist and the influence the Australian radio program The Listening Room had on Australia’s sonic avant garde. We then listen to his piece Out Of Thin Air: Radio Art Essay #1, which both explores and exemplifies the possibilities of radio art. It’s both informative and a total treat for the ears! The piece was originally commissioned by the Dreamlands commissions for Radio Arts, funded by the Arts Council England and Kent County Council. Out Of Thin Air: Radio Art Essay #1 is a meta-referencing poetic reflection and meditation on radio art underpinned by an artistic treatment of dislocation, transmission, reception and place as a thematic underscore. The work is in the form of an abstract song cycle that chiefly oscillates between “songs” originating from High Frequency (HR) radio static/broadcasts between 3 and 30 MHz and those from interviewees replying to questions relating to radio art. Location recordings, sound effect and musical composition weave this originating material together to form a sonic confluence and juxtaposition of elements to stimulate the listener’s imagination while offering an insight into the work’s subject matter. Interviewees (in order of appearance): Armeno Alberts, Tom Roe, Jean-Philippe Renoult, Gregory Whitehead, Götz Naleppa, Andrew McLennan, Elisabeth Zimmermann, Heidi Grundmann, Andreas Hagelüken, Teri Rueb and Kaye Mortley Producer and Composer: Colin Black High Frequency (HR) radio receiver operator: Dimitri Papagianakis Duration: 00:25:10 Music for this episode is by Blue the Fifth.  We also hear a brief excerpt of Things Change,Things Stay the Same by Rik Rue.

Ep. 20: What is Radio Art (Colin Black)

It's been a minute, so in this short episode, we update you on what's happening with Phantom Power and what's coming in 2020. The big (and sad) news is that co-host cris cheek is departing. After two years of lending his unique voice, ideas, and turns of phrase to the show--not to mention producing fantastic episodes like his interview with This Heat's Charles Hayward--cris has decided to refocus on his many other creative endeavors.  We will miss cris, but the show will go on. And he's been kind enough to let us continue using his golden intro! Check out the pod to hear about some of our upcoming 2020 episodes, with guests including Colin Black, Harriet Ottenheimer, Jonathan Sterne, and Siavash Amini.   

Ep. 19: Under Construction

Today we re-cast one of our favorite episodes, an interview with folklorist and Houston native Langston Collin Wilkins, who studies "slab" culture and the "screwed and chopped" hip hop that rattles the slabs and serves as the culture's soundtrack. Since the 1990s, many of Houston’s African American residents have customized cars and customized the sound of hip hop. Cars called “slabs” swerve a slow path through the city streets, banging out a distinctive local music that paid tribute to those very same streets and neighborhoods. Wilkins shows us how sonic creativity turns a space—a collection of buildings and streets—into a place that is known, respected, and loved. In this show we hear the slow, muddy, psychedelic sounds of DJ Screw and The Screwed Up Click, including rappers such as Lil Keke, Fat Pat, Big Hawk, and UGK--as well as songs by Geto Boys, Willie Dee, Swishahouse, Point Blank, Biggie Smalls, and MC T Tucker & DJ Irv. Photos by Langston Collin Wilkins. Transcript [low humming and static playing] [CRIS CHEEK] This…is…Phantom Power. [Tamborine beat blends in] Episode 7: Screwed and Chopped. [Hip hop music with vocals cuts in] Parental discretion is advised. Welcome to Phantom Power. I’m cris cheek. Today on the seventh and final episode of our first season, my co-host Mack Hagood converses with Langston Collin Wilkins. Langston is a folklorist an ethnomusicologist active in both academia and the public sector. Working as a traditional art specialist at the Tennessee Arts Commission. Mack spoke with Langston recently about his research into Houston’s unique slab, car culture. The city’s relationship to hip hop and hip hop’s to community. Enjoy. [Different hip hop music plays] [MACK HAGOOD] So before we get into the research of Langston Collin Wilkins, maybe we should get one question out of the way. Why would a folklorist be studying hip hop? Don’t they study things like folk tales or traditional music or quilting? Well, in fact the folklorist I know study things like bodybuilding and fashion and internet memes. Folklorists study everyday creativity. One contemporary definition of folklore is “artistic communication in small groups.” As Langston shows, it’s the way a town like Houston gets a look and a sound all its own, but folklore didn’t lead Langston to hip hop. In fact, it was quite the other way around. [Hip hop music cuts out] [LANGSTON COLLINS WILKINS] Back when I was a kid, around 12 years old, I received my first hip hop record, which was the “Ghetto Boys Resurrection Album”  in 1996. [A song from the album plays] Born and raised in Houston, Texas, the south side, where Scarface is from that same area. The Ghetto Boys in my hometown heroes as they are for everyone growing up in Houston in those communities. I just became obsessed with hip hop, and not just the music, but just the larger culture and community surrounding it. I was reading everything I could get my hands on about hip hop, I was watching everything, just studying the culture and that kind of continued through college. When I got the grad school, I went hoping to study hip hop in some form or fashion. It was through hip hop that I learned about folklore and became interested in it. I spent a year doing ethnographic research in Houston amongst the hip hop community there. I focus mostly on I guess the more street oriented or gangsta rappers, and we’re studying the artists and producers connection to place. I was looking at how and why these artists was so deeply connected to the city itself, apartment buildings, streets, neighborhoods,  and how these attachments and connection to place have been reproduced in their musical output. [Different hip hop song plays] Why do Houston Raptors always shout out, call out, give dedications to places that they are familiar and intimately connected with? [Several places are listed through hip hop songs] Washington, Armstrong, Mainwelles and St. Williams. Robinson, Thomas Hopes,

Ep. 18: Screwed and Chopped (Re-cast)

What did going to the movies sound like back in the “silent film” era? The answer takes us on a strange journey through Vaudeville, roaming Chautauqua lectures, penny arcades, nickelodeons, and grand movie palaces. As our guest In today’s episode, pioneering scholar of film sound, Rick Altman, tells us, the silent era has a lot to teach us about why sound works the way it does at the movies today. And as our other guest, sound and film historian Eric Dienstfrey tells us, “What we think of today as standard practice is far from inevitable.” In fact, some of the practices we’ll hear about are downright wacky.  Audiences today give little thought to the relationship between sound and images at the movies. When we hear a character's footsteps or inner thoughts or hear a rousing orchestral score that the character can’t hear, it all seems natural. Yet these are all conventions that had to be developed by filmmakers and accepted by audiences. And as Altman and Dienstfrey show us, the use of sound at the movies could have developed very differently. Film sound scholar Rick Altman and Mack after their interview at the University of Iowa. Dr. Rick Altman is Professor Emeritus of Cinema and Comparative Literature in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature, University of Iowa. Altman is known for his work on genre theory, the musical, media sound, and video pedagogy. He is the author of Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), Film/Genre (Bloomsbury, 1999), and A Theory of Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Dr. Eric Dienstfrey is Postdoctoral Fellow in American Music at the University of Texas at Austin. Eric is a historian of sound, cinema, and media technology. His paper "The Myth of the Speakers: A Critical Reexamination of Dolby History” won the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award for best article of the year in 2016. Transcript [ominous music plays] [CRIS CHEEK] This…is…Phantom Power. [MACK HAGOOD] Episode 17… [low horn instruments play] [CRIS] The Sounds of Silents [ERIC DEINSTFRY] We think of going to movies as going to the movies but for a lot of audiences, they were going to hear a live concert that was accompanied by motion pictures. And there’s this great anecdote that Anna Windisch uncovered in their scholarship in Viennese practices from the turn of the century. And they found a series of films, I believe, where you had the motion picture printed on film, but you also had a visual recording of the conductor, conducting a score that was meant to go along with that film. So I believe it was sort of like a superimposed image. So when you screen the film, you’ll see the conductor on screen conducting. And then the orchestra that was live in the theater playing would take its cues from the conductor that was on screen. [conductor taps baton, and orchestra plays] [MACK] It’s Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood. [CRIS] And I’m cris cheek. So what are we listening to here, Mack? [MACK] This is Eric Deinstfry. He’s a historian of sound technology and sound media working at the University of Texas, Austin. And he knows a lot about the history of sound in motion pictures. [CRIS] So what’s he talking about? [MACK] It’s this crazy story told me about the silent film era in Vienna. You know, back in the early days of film, people had to figure out how to combine music and film. And as you can imagine in Vienna they had this illustrious classical music today. With fame conductors, and it seemed like a good idea to just  put the conductor in the film and let the local orchestras where the film was being shown just sort of follow his conducting. [CRIS] Yeah, but I’m imagining this didn’t go so well. [MACK] No, it didn’t. [orchestra music continues] [ERIC] And, like a lot of these practices, they’re fine. They’re enjoyable, but they don’t always work.

Ep. 17: The Sounds of Silents

Why do certain musical sounds move us while others leave us cold? Are musical trends simply that—or do they contain insights into the culture at large? Our guest is a musicologist who studies pop and electronic dance music. She’s fascinated by the way EDM privileges timbral and rhythmic complexity over the chord changes and harmonic complexities of the blues-based rock and pop music of yore. However, Robin James is also a philosopher and she connects these musical structures to social and economic structures, not to mention structural racism and sexism.  Robin James In this episode, cris and Mack have a lengthy, freeform interview and listening session with Robin in which she breaks down the sounds of EDM, pop, hip hop, “chill” playlists, and industrial techno, conceiving them as varied responses to neoliberalism’s intensification of capitalism. Her analysis includes lyrical content, but her main focus is the soars, stutters, breaks, and drops that mimic the socio-economic environment of the 21st century. It's an environment that demands resilience from all of us—and especially from women and people of color.   Robin James’s books include:  Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, neoliberalism (Zer0 Books, 2015). The Sonic Episteme: acoustic resonance & biopolitics (Duke, 2019). The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, & the Philosophy of Music (Lexington Books, 2010). Transcript [ominous music plays] [CRIS CHEEK] This…is…Phantom Power. [techno music fades in] [MAC HAGOOD] Episode 16. [CRIS] Soul and chill. [MACK] Hey, I’m Mack Hagood, and yes, you are hearing Calvin Harris on Phantom Power, the podcast on the sonic arts and humanities. Why you might ask? Well, our guest today spends a lot of time listening to Calvin Harris and David Guetta. She calls them the Coke and Pepsi of pop, electronic dance music or EDM. As a musicologist, she’s fascinated by how EDM pushes beyond tonality. That is the harmonies and chord progressions that are the focus of blues based rock and pop music. EDM cares more about Tambor, and rhythmic complexity, ear catching sounds and intense Sonic experiences. moments when the vocal stutters for the beat drops moments like this one, where the entire song begins to soar. [music continues] But Robin James isn’t just a musicologist. She’s also a philosopher. She really wants to know what these songs can tell us about society. And while many cultural analyses of pop songs focus on song lyrics, with a few vague gestures towards sound, Robin James brings her musical logical experience to bear connecting musical structures to economic structures, not to mention structural racism and sexism. To my mind, the strength of her work is that she makes admirably bold and clear claims about why certain kinds of popular music are popular in a given moment. And whether or not you decide you agree with those claims by the end of the show, you may never hear an EDM sore quite the same way again. In today’s episode, my co host cris cheek and I have a lengthy freeform conversation and listening session with Robin, in which she breaks down EDM pop songs featured in her book “ Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism Neoliberalism.” We also get into a bit of hip hop, as well as songs from her current research into chill music in the streaming era. Robin James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte, and co editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. For the 2019-2020 academic year. She is also visiting Associate Professor of Music at Northeastern University. And by the way, she got her started musicology and philosophy as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio, where cris and I teach. [music fades out] [ROBIN JAMES] So I started college as an oboe major back in the 90s. Yeah. [CRIS] You were playing oboe at Miami? [ROBIN] Yes.  [CRIS] Okay. [ROBIN] I played Piccolo in the marching band. I thought I wanted to be a conductor. I was taking philosophy classes.

Ep. 16: Soar and Chill (Robin James)

With My Gothic Dissertation, University of Iowa PhD Anna M. Williams has transformed the dreary diss into a This American Life-style podcast. Williams’ witty writing and compelling audio production allow her the double move of making a critical intervention into the study of the gothic novel, while also making an entertaining and thought-provoking series for non-experts. Williams uses famed novels by authors such as Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelly as an entry point for a critique of graduate school itself—a Medieval institution of shadowy corners, arcane rituals, and a feudal power structure. The result is a first-of-its-kind work that serves as a model for doing literary scholarship in sound.  Anna M. Williams This episode of Phantom Power offers you an exclusive preview of My Gothic Dissertation. First, Mack Hagood interviews Williams about creating the project, then we listen to a full chapter—a unique reading of Frankenstein that explores how the university tradition can restrict access to knowledge even as it tries to produce knowledge.  You can learn more about Anna M. Williams and her work at her website. This episode features music from Neil Parsons’ 8-Bit Bach Reloaded.  Transcript [ominous music plays] [CRIS CHEEK] This…is…Phantom Power. Episode 15: Goth Diss. [sound of wind blowing] [ANNA WILLIAMS] It’s May 4th 2017, and I’m in room 311 of the English philosophy building.  [jazzy music plays] Room 311 is a windowless closet crowded with a conference table and rolling chairs that currently contain the five members of my dissertation committee. A radio scholar, A romanticist, an 18th century-ist education theorist and Victorianist. [MALE VOICE] So we’re here to talk prospectus and I welcome you with my colleagues. And we’re interested in raising constructive questions that will help you with clarifying focus, the scope, and the process because the process is so interesting. [ANNA] It’s the job of these five people to advise me over the next months, or more likely years as I write my dissertation, which is the only thing standing between me and my doctorate in English. What we’re here to discuss today, isn’t my dissertation per se, but rather my prospectus, a Microsoft Word document spanning anywhere from six to 20 pages that describes the dissertation, the one I haven’t written yet. In this way, think of the prospectus as a sort of dissertation permission slip, a sheet of paper that once signed allows me to climb on board the bus and head into the field of academic literary criticism. And if I don’t earn my committee signatures at the end of this meeting, then I guess I’m going to have to stay behind and eat my bag lunch all by myself. [music fades out] [MACK HAGOOD] Hey, everyone, its Phantom Power. Sounds about sound, the podcast where we explore sound in the arts and humanities. I’m Mack Hagood. My partner, cris cheek is out vagabonding. It’s summer, I caught sight of him via social media on the Appalachian Trail. As you hear this, he may be in London or Rome. cris, if you’re listening, I hope you brought your recorder with you pick up some good sounds for us. And yeah, it’s summer. But there was something I wanted to share with you because it’s hot off the audio presses. One of the really nice and unexpected fringe benefits of doing this show is we’ve started to get invites to come and talk to folks about how to do academic work in sound, and what the potential of podcasting is in the world of sharing ideas. And so I was giving one of those talks at the University of Iowa. And people were telling me we have a PhD student who is doing her dissertation in podcast form. The author’s name is Anna M. Williams, and her project is called My Gothic Dissertation. [carnival sounds and music play] It’s a study of the Gothic novel, something that many literary critics, like Williams have studied in the past. But she does it in podcast form. And she uses the Gothic novel as a venue as an avenue into ...

Ep. 15: Goth Diss (Anna M. Williams)

A podcast on sound art, sound studies, and the sonic humanities

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Phantom Power

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