Speed Listening: Reading Machines and Audio Fantasy

1st International Congress on Phonetics and Poetics
Speed Listening: Reading Machines and Audio Fantasy
Nov. 14, 2024 (30 min.): MP4

 

Part One: Speed Reading Wood to Brown
Part Two: The Topoi of Tempi

extracts:

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When writing my introduction to Close Listening, I emphasize that all forms, even the ostensively performative, were rhetorical choices and there was no escape from performativity. One thing, though, that I have often had misgiving about was my stated preference for audio to video. It’s not that I don’t want to see videos of poets reading and the impact is to some degree greater. But I value above all the audio imaginary, from radio talking to audiobooks, which allows for an experience closer to reading.  As I said in the Close Listening introduction, I mostly dislike actors reading poetry and feel any kind of background music pretty much destroys the music of the poem. However, perhaps it would be better to say that a particular kind of acting impairs the poem — the kind that adds emotion, personality, drama, a back story, rather than lets the reader project into the poem and find any of those things for themselves. You could say that these sorts of readings turn the poem into kitsch

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Not the mayor of Tempi, Az or the king of tempests. And not tempura. I’m talking about about speed, pace, rhythm: not meter but meter-making arguments. Much poetry needs to be heard in the way that puns need to be heard — reading aloud or proactive vocalization is needed to allow you to hear the physical rhythms and the gestures of sound  (which is comparable for those working, for example, with sign language with the the embodied gesture of signing). In my experience as a teacher, students, even graduate students, generally do not read poetry aloud or actively subvocalize. This is why sound recordings or reciting or memorizing poems is so crucial, to put us  — to put us  back in this habit. Notice I am not in synch. Prose is synch, poetry asynchronous.

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While speed reading suppresses the vocal dimension of a text, speed listening does not, and this is the key to why it works. It turns out we can listen far faster than we can read. The key technology here is the automated pitch adjustment when you increase the tempo, so you don’t get the high-pitched sound we all loved as kids playing a 33rpm record at 78. So, this possibility of speed listening is just at its dawn: a new technology allows easy conversion of any word file or pdf — into speech, with easy adjustment of the speed and a choice of many voices — or even cloning your own voice.

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Saturate Light: Black marks on a white page

What is the phonic imaginary of Dickinson’s black marks on a white field, which suggest a radical openness and underdeterminacy nearly unique in Western poetry: “dwelling in” and as “possibility”?

 Dickinson ends her poem by calling the space between two people, between an “us” — a “white” substance –– “sustenance” –– that she also calls a  privilege.  This is the also the whiteness of the page against which we make our marks, the topoi of the tempo, which can keep its sound shape at all speeds.

 “With just the door ajar.”

 The whiteness of the page is neither “Misery” or “In Vain”: it is the possibility of aesthetic experience.

 It is ecstasy.

 It is saturated light.

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In which I try to reimagine the keynote speed in the age of Zoom. Thanks to Valentina Colonna for making that possible.