Interviews¶
Note on transcription:
These interview transcripts are produced using the www⁄Reduct transcription platform. The transcripts contain artefacts and politics of machinic listenings NLP and ASR such as the occasional Miss Herd word, and ah vocalised hesitations and filler sounds.
Transcripts that we have manually reworked are marked
More on the ML and Reduct collaboration here. Transcripts are hosted on the ML Gitea repository.
Dan McQuillan¶
www⁄Dan talks to us about his www⁄work on the automation of (mental) health care from voice analysis. Along the way, we also discuss algorithmic thouthlessness, data luddism, the automation of care, people's councils for machine learning, and Dan's www⁄latest book on anti-fascist approaches to artificial intelligence.
Interview conducted on 22 August, 2022
Jonathan Sterne and Elena Razlogova¶
We talk with www⁄Jonathan and www⁄Elena about their www⁄collaborative work on AI and the automation of music mastering, with a particular focus on Montreal-based platform www⁄LANDR. But the conversation inevitably drifts towards much bigger questions on the politics of automation and machine listening.
Interview conducted on 12 August, 2022
Sara Ramshaw and Paul Stapleton¶
www⁄Sara and www⁄Paul talk to us about their work on improvisation as it connects with questions of justice, composition and performance. We range from George Lewis' early experiments with interactive music systems on Rainbow Family to family law in Northern Ireland, and what it might mean to www⁄'humanise' algorithmic listening.
Interview conducted on 27 May, 2021
Liz Pelly¶
www⁄Liz talks to us about the cultural politics and political economy of Spotify. We talk through some of the ideas in her www⁄amazing column for The Baffler, along with some of the listening experiments she's conducted on Spotify's algorithms (and herself), before turning to her argument for www⁄'socialised streaming'.
Interview conducted on 23 March, 2021
Mara Mills, Xiaochang Li, Jessica Feldman, Michelle Pfeifer¶
www⁄Mara, www⁄Xiaochang, www⁄Jessica and www⁄Michelle talk us through the history and politics of machine listening, from 'affect recognition' and the 'statistical turn' in ASR to automated accent detection at the German border, voiceprints and the 'assistive pretext'. This is an expansive conversation with an amazing group of scholars, who share a common connection to the www⁄Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, founded by Neil Postman in 1971 at the urging of Marshall McLuhan.
Interview conducted on 19 February, 2020
Lauren Lee McCarthy¶
www⁄Lauren talks us through some of her many works concerned with smart speakers, machine listening and social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. We discuss: www⁄LAUREN, for which she attempted to become a human version of Alexa, www⁄SOMEONE, which won her the www⁄Prix Ars Electronica 2020 / Interactive Art +, and a range of related works and political questions.
Interview conducted on 22 September, 2020
Alex Ahmed¶
www⁄Alex talks to us about www⁄Project Spectra, an online, community-based, free and open source software application for transgender voice training. We discuss speech pathology and the politics of pitch, along with the importance of grass-roots led tech projects and community-centred design.
Interview conducted on 21 September, 2020
Stefan Maier¶
www⁄Stefan's 2018 www⁄dossier on machine listening for Technosphere puts the work of artists like George Lewis, Jennifer Walshe, Florian Hecker, and Maryanne Amacher into conversation with Google's wavenet. We talk about these and other works along with Stefan's own compositions which treat machine listening as a prepared instrument, ready to be detourned.
Interview conducted on 11 September, 2020
Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy¶
www⁄Yolande and www⁄Jenny provide a “reboot” manifesta in their book www⁄The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot, which lays out their proposals for improving the design and social effects of digital voice assistants, social robots, sex robots, and other AI arriving in the home.
Interview conducted on 11 October, 2020
Jùnchéng Billy Lì¶
www⁄Billy tells us about his research on 'adversarial music', and in particular an attempt to produce a www⁄'Real World Audio Adversary Against Wake-word Detection Systems' for Amazon Alexa.
Interview conducted on 11 September, 2020
André Dao¶
www⁄André talks to us about www⁄UN Global Pulse, the UN's big data initiative, and in particular one program which 'uses machine Learning to analyse radio content in Uganda'. We discuss the increasing entanglements of big tech, the UN and human rights discourse more broadly, as well as an emergent right to be counted.
Interview conducted on 4 September, 2020
Angie Abdilla¶
Angie talks to us about www⁄Old Ways, New, the Indigenous owned and led social enterprise she founded, based on Gadigal land in Redfern, Sydney. We discuss www⁄Decolonising the Digital, Country Centered Design, a methodology which applies Indigenous design principles to the development of technologies for places, spaces and experiences, and how this contrasts with the ‘placelessness’ on which so many machine learning/listening systems are based.
Interview conducted on 1 September, 2020
James Parker (w Jasmine Guffond)¶
This is the first of three radio shows as part of www⁄Jasmine's guest residency at Noods Radio. It features an interview with www⁄James about his research on machine listening, this curriculum, the project with Unsound, and a selection of electronic music.
Interview conducted on 1 September, 2020
Vladan Joler¶
Vladan walks us through www⁄Anatomy of an AI System, his 2018 work with www⁄Kate Crawford, which diagrams the Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources. We talk about the politics of visibility and method as well as Vladan's work with www⁄Share Lab, 'where indie data punk meets media theory pop to investigate digital rights blues'.
Interview conducted on 1 September, 2020
Halcyon Lawrence¶
www⁄Halcyon talks us through some of her work on the politics of voice user interfaces: in particular accent bias, 'Siri discipline' and the ways in which smart speakers reproduce and hardwire longstanding forms of linguistic imperialism.
Interview conducted on 31 August, 2020
Thomas Stachura¶
Thomas is CEO of www⁄Paranoid Inc, which makes devices that block smart speakers from listening. The company's mandate 'earn lots of money by increasing privacy, not eroding it' imagines an emerging privacy industry, as data mining and surveillance continues to become the dominant business model in silicon valley and elsewhere.
Interview conducted on 28 August, 2020
Mark Andrejevic¶
www⁄Mark's recent book www⁄Automated Media considers the politics of automation through the 'cascading logics' of pre-emption, operationalism, and 'framelessness'. We talk through some of these ideas, along with the limits of 'surveillance capitalism' as an analytic frame, 'touchlessness' in the time of Covid, 'operational listening', what automation is doing to subjectivity… and how all this relates to reality TV.
Interview conducted on 21 August, 2020
Shannon Mattern¶
Leading off from www⁄Shannon's essay www⁄"Urban Auscultation; or, Perceiving the Action of the Heart", which addresses machine listening in the pandemic, we talk about the stethoscope, the decibel and other histories of machine listening, along with its epistemic and political dimensions and artistic deployments.
Interview conducted on 18 August, 2020
Kathy Reid¶
www⁄Kathy talks to us about her work with www⁄Mycroft, www⁄Mozilla Voice and now 3AI on open source voice assistants and the technics and politics of automatic speech recognition, along with a couple of utopian possibilities.
Interview conducted on 11 August, 2020