 Why don't we get started? It's wonderful to see all the attendees tonight and I'm just going to get started tonight. We are very pleased to have Jonathan Stern, who many of you know, teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is the author of Diminished Faculties of Political Phenomenology of Impairment, from which he'll be drawing tonight. 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. Can everybody hear me okay? Just making sure. Okay. Thank you Vivek. I want to thank Andrew too for setting me up and remembering to ask about my access needs. That was a nice touch. You're going to get to talk in three parts today. Originally I was going to make you one long movie and then I was going to chat with people in the chat window the whole time and it was going to be great. But it totally didn't work. So there's a movie for eleven and a half minutes at the end. The middle part is me doing talking torso for you. And the first part is a last 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 the third chapter to mix my metaphors. I want to begin with a land acknowledgement. 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 zooms the technical custodium, custodian, the platform on which we're gathered today, we're no less occupants of the multiple territories on which we're all physically located. I'm speaking to you from the unceded territory of Jojage, now known as Montreal, the Gananyanka, sorry Gananyanka Ha 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 $117 billion as of the end of 2020. Zoom's headquarters are located on Muwatma Olone territory. And when it comes to sustainability, communal living and giving gifts to passersby, the Olone have more to offer than another corporation. The Olone'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 faculties of 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 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 that ate my right recurrent laryngeal nerve. That means that one of my vocal cords is paralyzed to 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 is 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 Lorne Bacall after several packs of cigarettes kind of thing. 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 seems. But this led me down a path I've been reading and thinking with disability studies for many years. And so it led me down the path of working on and thinking about this book. So 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, 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. 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 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. And so it is, in some ways, the most ponderous chapter, because it's written in that sort of ponderous phenomenological voice, but it's also got lots of good details of awkward social interactions. And it also begins with me waking up on the surgical table. So there's that. Chapter two is meet the Dorca phone. This is the Dorca phone. Oh, yeah, I forgot I have pictures. This is an illustration for chapter one done by 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 Lachlan, very kindly helped helped me and us out with it. And so that's in the book. So chapter two is about the Dorca phone. That's going to be what I talk about today. So I won't say much about it right now, except it's a personal voicing 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 certain consonants aren't distinguishable from one another. So it's not Bork. 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 on my desk a few minutes ago, is what I'm calling the auto Dorca phone, which I'll talk about midway through the talk. But you can see there's a microphone there on 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 later on. Chapter three is written. 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. We've even mapped it out for you. So you can see here where the different exhibits and rooms are on 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 ideology of vocal ability, or for more history of the larynx or something like that. So it's also like very much I can see. 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. 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 from a work called constellations by the Australian artist Marco Fuzanato. And it is designed to produce, I think 120 decibels of sound when you hit a wall with a baseball bat. And 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, entailed 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 odd aisle scarification. And it's everything from loud noises to the historical origins of ear plugs. The final chapter is called there isn't there are never enough spoons. It is named for an idea from the writer Christina Mizoran Mizorandino, who coined the spoon theory, 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 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. The final chapter, or the conclusion then is an instruction manual for using impairment theory. It's illustrated by the artist Darsha Hewitt. This is one of her illustrations. And 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 two, which is entitled meet the dork a phone. So this is a dork a 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 as fake cowskin 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 Spokeman's, or do you call them spokesman? Now it's two dork a phones, each of which cost me about $300 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. They live in backpacks. They traveled all over the world with me. They've been operated at high altitude. And yet they're also surprisingly hearty. 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 defining brand like Kleenex or Xerox, but whose names all point to this weird gray area of voice and technique that it occupies speech amplifier, voice amplifier, personal public address system, personal voice amplifier, chatterbox, amplavox, sound pocket, Xevox, Zawate, voice buddy, sound buddy, Zygo. But unlike the Walkman, they don't signify mastery or cruelness. They represent the social oddity of personal voice amplification itself. Now 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 Dorca phone 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 Dorca phone on zoom. I'll have things to say about zoom a little bit later. So this is purely for the benefit of this talk. In real life, I haven't had an occasion to use this since before March 2020. But still, I wrote about the Dorca phone. 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 Dorca 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 boomboxes, 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 Dorca phone as a prosthetic, I wish they were more like eyeglasses, once a stigmatizing object, and now a fashion accessory. Instead, Dorca phones share a set of cultural and technical problems with hearing aids and cochlear implants. Hearing aids introduced issues of portability and miniaturization and 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 Chypre Verde's new book, Hearing Happiness also deals with the history of hearing aids and deafness cures. So the Dorca 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 Hendron, is that assistive in front of the technology is actually redundant term, because all technologies are designed to assist. So what an assistive technology does is it marks the person who is visibly using it as a need of assistance. In other words, the technology itself is in some ways disabling socially, even as it is assistive processually. 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 is 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 person has a voice to speak with and from where truly comes. The Dorca 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. Even though technically, mouths are just modulators. In wearing a Dorca 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 does creates a distance between me and my voice, even though there's already one. And the mic on my head in the box hanging from my neck, call attention to this distance, destabilizing ideologies and 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 to 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 of visual coupling between mouth and voice, which I'm going to call oral voice, the oral voices 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, 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 from a position of seeing from nowhere and a hearing from everywhere. The dork of phones 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 Hendren book that I mentioned and the Verdi book I read, I mentioned Amy Hamre, Bess Williamson, and Grand Pawn have also written excellent things on disability and 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 for all sorts of give and take around meaning. In her case, and she's talking about a an artificial leg, she says, their significant figural movement from metonymy to synecdoche, from the prosthetic viewed abstractly to my prosthetic leaning up against the wall near my bed in the morning to my leg, which works with the other one and enables me to walk. In my case, the dork of phone assimilates into my voice in action. So let's follow Subchak's arrow of figuration. The voice is an impossible abstraction. My dork of phone charging on my desk, my voice, what makes the dork of phone noticeable and sometimes uncanny is its proximity to the physical generation of sound and my diaphragm throat and mouth. This is its defining techno cultural feature. It audibly and visibly 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. And it's worth pointing out that this idea of prosthesis is still getting a lot of play in media theory, right? So that media or prosthetic in inherently in some way. But that is to metaphorize prosthesis. And in McLuhan's original discussion of it, it's quite he metaphorizes directly says media, like our prosthetic or they amputate the body, but he's not actually talking about actual amputation or amputees. So disability becomes an 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 in the hand in Stiegler. But that's a that's a discussion 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 is 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 Dorca 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 Dorca phoné. Leg and voice prostheses 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 and 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 fuck is that? I offered the shortest explanation I could muster classes for my vocal cords, came from 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 with disability in the gaze. So once the social question the Dorca phone presents is answered, what the fuck 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 Dorca phones and prosthesis. But I want to, I want to talk to you a little bit from a section called of other Dorca phones, which is named of course for Foucault's of other spaces. And I've worked on some sort of experimental alternatives. But now I want to talk about the setup that came to zoom because it actually pertains to you even if you don't have a vocal impairment. My confinement during COVID 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, we're 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. And this is why when mobile phones were first to 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 dork a 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 a 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 some tech support jokes in the article. But I'm gonna earn the chapter, but I'm going to 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 locality begin from a founding disunity of people and voices and a founding understanding of voice that cast it in the plural. There's a growing body of scholarship that begins from this premise, you know, I'd time Amanda Weidman, Merrill Alper, 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 audiology 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 kite that's perfect. What I seek from any dork of 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 instrumentality requires practice and work, like a musician who bonds with some instruments, but not others. My problem with other dork of phones is that I don't know if I can get to this state of the instrumentality. Okay, that is the talking torso part of the talk now. And I made a video for you. And so this will be the last 11 minutes of the talk. And it's a little like introduction to some of the things you'll find in the imaginary exhibition of other vocalities. Here we go. So I wanted to just share a few examples from the imaginary exhibition of new vocalities that I thought would benefit from durational media or durational presentation. This first one is Nina Ketchadourian's talking popcorn. As you can see it handily explains itself. Check out that microphone. There it is again. My favorite thing about this piece, besides the just incredible amount of labor, and the elaborate sort of machine to set this up is the degree to which it shows that voice is a matter of reception and interpretation. So one of the things Ketchadourian did is actually take those last words and play them for and show them to a cartographer, a death duwala 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 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 Mike is a sure SM 57, 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 SM 57 is the perfect thing that you want to explore was to the heat and grease of a popcorn popper, 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 listening in a portrait of Charles Grace, or by the artist Darren Martin. And as you can see from the image here, it's actually a multimodal work that's meant to be projected in three different places at once. And then you're in a room in 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 where 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. 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 from Richfield finally and one Sunday I took the truck out and I had to be back because there's a school function had you the evening. This next piece by Hoda and Yousuf is an experiment in deaf music video. So it actually has no soundtrack. And this was done with a group of people sort of organized by Viro Le Duc at the University of Quebec. Oh, Moréan Yousuf is a deaf artist and performer and you can see it is very musical despite there's no sound. Here signing takes a place of vocality. It takes a place of an audible voice on an audible soundtrack and produces both sort of the expressive form as well as the sort of narrative form of the video. And the last piece I'll share with you today is 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. You can see here, she spreads out the lines around the edge. She then writes musical notation over for the voice over the 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 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, 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 that you check out the writing of the authors I've referenced throughout this talk. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm going to open up. Thanks to questions. I'm going to figure out how to stop sharing. There we go. Yeah, happy to discuss anything. So I'll be keeping an eye on the Q&A bar as well as taking taking questions from on screen, whether you'd like to use your hands or the hand symbol. I see TL wondering about the video lag. 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 Jackson position of the two moments. So perfect. This is all about rupturing the audio visual contract. Yeah, it did remind me a lot of old Eno looping stuff as well. So it caught my ear. Well, I'll start with a question just picking up on one one thing that you mentioned in passing and that is the sort of more recent move to in design. In terms of applying new design principles to um, prostheses to different 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 I guess that the impetus behind it and who who is involved in in in just designing new new forms of prostheses and sure. Well, 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 so designers in the last couple of decades have started working with people with disabilities and also thinking more seriously about prostheses and other technologists 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 for for coverage. So you certainly wouldn't 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 reimbursement. But but yeah, the idea the idea behind it is simply that on one, so for one, you know, if you're designing something for someone, they ought to be involved. And to 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 activists in wheelchairs most notably the Rolling Crips 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 a double base with a wheel on it, or a roller board suitcase or pick your pick your example. Another would be closed captioning, which is a fight we're having right now, in terms of online media and zoom and things like that. Closed captioning starts out being again thought of and this is Greg Downey's book, which is a great history of closed captioning, starts out being a thing that network TV networks in the U.S. resist because 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 basically, you know, uses machine learning to 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, at least for the time being. But Otter's user agreements very interesting because what they say is, well, we don't own your speech. We don't own the content of 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 design for disability and the politics that access and sort of other kinds of capitalist enterprises that might be, I mean, there isn't a good word for this in my disability class, we call it Crip Washing, like greenwashing where it's this is being presented as Mara Mills calls it the assisted pretext or is being presented as useful for 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 Dorca phone is clearly not an example of design for disability. However, I have been working with an artist, Alexis Emanueloff. You can go to her website, Luthierie Postmodern, and she has been working on, she does 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 me 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 lighter and more fashionable Dorca phone that we're going to try out when there's an occasion to do it. Will you still call it a Dorca phone when it doesn't look like that? No, she's like you have to name it something else. All right, Tio. Thanks for such the interesting talk. It was really cool. I really love the point you made about kind of rethinking phenomenology and sort of, I don't know, revisiting that approach and then your own writing and sort of a more personal voice at this point. So I was just curious if you had any other kind of meta reflections on writing phenomenology and your own experience. I don't, very open ended, but... Thanks. Well, I'm definitely not planning to do it in everything I write for the rest of my career. I don't know, it's really like, 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, especially like the Husserl Heidegger and even Merluponte, although he's better and he's the one that the feminists tend to go back to. The grand con is that you can't, 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 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 could think of it in literary criticism, in film theory, in historical musicology, in history, in architecture, in 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. In disability studies itself hasn't fully reckoned with this. I mean, there are writers who do this really well. Alison Kafer does this really good job in Feminist Queer Crip 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 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. And so for me, this whole book, it was very much, especially the first three chapters, like and then the conclusion, very much in a little bit elsewhere, an experiment in writing 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 Dorca phone puns and stuff, and that's sort of the Crip Humor chapter. I don't know if I mentioned this, like originally I wanted the book to end with a cap throwing up on me, but that ends the fatigue chapter and I couldn't figure out 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 can't believe that they're letting me do this kind of writing, but it was a good experience, I don't know. I don't know what it's going to mean for Down the Road, like 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 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. 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. I was interested in the comment you mentioned kind of from a media studies perspective how you know, the voice is kind of like your voice, but versus the kind of the mediated voice that goes through 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. 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 the book might answer the question or it might not. Okay. So a couple of 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 barks 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 to talk about any cause of a sound is already to reduce it in a way. I mean, obviously, you know, if you're talking about intention, like I, the intending subject, 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 cause 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. Tobin come is term coined by Tobin Siebers. And it's simply the idea that people would rather be have ability is preferable to disability. We would rather people be able rather than disabled. And like on one level intuitively that makes sense. Alison Kaffer 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. 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 to like represent that they're being silenced. That is and that's the ideology of vocal 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 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 Katchadurian's talking popcorn is not Siri. Right. No one is interacting with talking popcorn. Like no one's going to 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, 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 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 and the chair kept saying Jonathan you look concerned. And it was just the sun in my eyes. So it's like I had I feel pardon the term resting zoom bitch 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 persons command of their abilities but it also might not and especially along linguistic contexts. When you're thinking about accents Nina I times working on this as well as I'm forgetting your name I just saw talk of ours on the name will come to me when I talk about something else. But accent is disability and 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 no 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 who says thank you Jonathan for the amazing presentation. I'm interested in the metaphorization of disability in media studies that you mentioned. In your opinion why is the disability slash prosthetic metaphor so sticky persistent. What kinds of advocacy do you see needed in order to make academia itself. Oh boy well thank you anonymous attendee that's a great question. I want to see it so I'm just clicking over to answer while I'm answering it. 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 not 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 we've been seeing that change around indigeneity and around blackness over the last few years in a lot of previously overwhelmingly white curricula feminists have been fighting this battle for generations with cannons 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. 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 learned I so I went to Norbert Wiener's archives looking for something at MIT at the MIT library. If you go through his papers there's 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 tuning time book before she wrote about Wiener and disability 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. 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 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 later work on animals and so in those cases 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 Dorca phones even though I make fun of them I like artificial limbs I like artificial larynxes like all those things are good but prosthetic technology when understood socially when understood I think correctly through the lens of power relations or in concert we're talking about power relations is not the same thing as somebody who's not coded is disabled by their technology right it's also not the same thing but other technologies cause revulsion like the Google glass slash glass hole phenomenon right which is a kind of discounting of the wearer but that's different than a sort of 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 about indigeneity just as they should learn about race and sexuality and gender and age as one of the things you should just know a little bit about whether you do it or not I think that would be that would be really good and really helpful as far as making academia itself less ableist that's a huge job 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 bio certification 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 have institutional legitimacy right so bio certification is problematic because of access to health care because certain illnesses themselves are stigma stigmatized I just taught this great film Unrest by the filmmaker Jen Brea you can find it on Vimeo which is documentary on chronic fatigue syndrome that's still not very well understood 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 able as to I do a lot of things personally in my own classrooms like even just saying in a zoom meeting you know it's okay to stand 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 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 and so people do this we know with for instance face paintings that might you know attempt to avoid face recognition I'm wondering if people use vocal prostheses to try to avoid having the types of data collection that you discussed yeah yeah I know 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 see me after class that's a great idea I mean the 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 a shadow and then their voices I think even Laurie Anderson performance where she's got she's got you know this device that you know transforms her voice and she's yeah yeah yeah no that's a I mean originally it was a vocoder I don't know what she's using I don't know what she's using now and obviously like it's used to great aesthetic effect in R&B 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 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 fact I have on my desk there's a group in Australia working on machine listening this is called eavesdropping a reader 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 but but really I think it'd be an interesting our 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 so I'll go to 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 there probably is in the psychology literature I haven't bothered to learn it 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 when it's not giving you that same feedback that you get in a room for instance so it's worse with headphones on although I use the headphones because they feed my voice back in 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 how much you can hear those conversations by the way I see in the chat somebody typed the name for me it's Pooja Rangan who's doing voice and accent as disability and she's part she's got a she's 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 if you're interested in the politics of accent her and then Nina Eidheim also has a project going great let's go to Mike and then 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 and go voice only it's extremely okay thank you at first I was like wow you're sitting so far back from the camera it's awesome a zoom power move no that was my photo thank you for the talk I really loved that 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 potential for aestheticization and art and kind of the realm that you're describing 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 was a trans artist who used pitch shifting technology I guess in some sense to somewhere feminine but really the result was to sound kind of just otherworldly right so the idea of you can use the pitch shifting somewhere 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 guess I'm just kind of curious especially about this part of the 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 Mara so the last chapter is on autotune and I think I saw Catherine Brovanzano's name in the audience who's writing a whole book on pitch correction and Owen Marshall also is working in this area so just before I go off on it I just want to make sure I'm not pretending I'm so generous so the pitch shifting thing as an aesthetic practice is really well established 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 as gendered so it's like very the high low thing is very much very much embedded and installed in sort of western local culture but by the 1970s that changes so one of the things um we're going to talk about later later in the book is pitch shifting like with the even tight harmonizer Parliament Funkadelic did this to create the character serenade's devoid of funk and you hear it later in prints you hear it in all sorts of EDM vocals vocal samples and of course also very commonly in R&B and hip hop people are using 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 they uh 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've played with other aspects of voice there used to be Antaris who made autotune also made a product called Throat which I don't think they make anymore but they'd actually had a visual or a 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 right there's a question in Q&A and thank you Sasha for being 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 who didn't really believe in culture right so McLuhan treats the senses in terms of sense ratios he treats 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 so it's ableist in the sense that he assumes that human beings all have the same sets of abilities and relations to those abilities which are then sort of ratioed I don't mean ratioed in the Twitter sense I mean put in ratios to one another so the reason why 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 that when people use when people use race or gender to describe something that is not about about sort of marginalized people so I think of like men using gender the insults designed for women for other men for instance that is like there's no non-sexist way to do that 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 to them if you want to talk but 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 example that I think helps which is disability simulation which is still used in medical schools quite often so you give students blindfolds and say well now you know a little bit about what it's like to be blind but actually you don't because first of all you know the blindfolds coming off and second of all anybody that's been blind for any amount of time is going to be way better at navigating around a room than the sighted person who just had a blindfold put on them so they're going to assume that blind people are disabled in all these ways that are actually not right and so that's part of the problem with McLuhan's McLuhan's understanding of amputation is this very superficial metaphorical one if you talk to people who've had things amputated they're not going to describe it the way McLuhan does and they're also probably not going to describe their prostheses the way McLuhan does I really recommend the Vivian Sobchak essay on her artificial leg the first it's got a long title but I think the first part is a leg to stand on is a good place for thinking about sort of the metaphoric work of prostheses and sort of the problems and opportunities around that great thank you so much and we're right up against 630 but there's one informational question what was it someone wanted to hear more about you mentioned a sorry I'm scrolling all the way back the designer who is working with you to create the alternative to the yeah and whether that designer has a website or yeah yeah let me description of their work if I type it into the chat let me just make sure her site is up because you know how it is with the digital humanities looks like it's not up at the moment but I'm going to give you so this is the name and I will also give you the website although can't guarantee that it's up at the moment let me triple check it is right thank you so much for that and thank you so much for your presentation and for all these amazing answers to all these amazing questions thank you all who participated in that way and we are we will look forward to the book and when is it when is the actual pub date December 1st 2021 I think there's some talk of November but let's say December okay so I want to thank you all for coming it's wonderful to see you while I'm stuck at home next time we'll like all go out for dinner and gossip after this because that's that's where the fun happens not that this wasn't super fun it's just a whole other regime of fun so all right lovely to see you all thank you so much thank you zoom away thanks take care