Phantom Power

Today host Mack Hagood is joined by three remarkable scholars whose work sits at the intersection of African music, technology, and culture. Dr. Louise Meintjes is Marcello Lotti Professor at Duke University. She's a distinguished ethnomusicologist whose groundbreaking research on South African music has transformed how we understand the recording studio as a site of cultural negotiation and creative production. Media anthropologist Dr. Reginold Royston is an Associate Professor jointly-appointed in the School of Information (formerly SLIS) and the Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He examines a range of African and African diasporic media and technology, from Black Atlantic audiobooks to African podcasting to viral dance videos emanating from Ghana and Chicago's footwork scene. And Kingsley Okyere is graduate student at Penn whose work on African and Afro-diasporic musical circulation and genres is bringing fresh perspectives on the sounds shaping the continent today. In this episode, we explore the evolution of Afrobeats and Amapiano, two genres that have captured global attention in recent years. We also discuss how technology and diaspora networks have shaped African popular music, examine questions of genre, identity, and global circulation, and consider the social and political contexts that inform music production and reception across the continent and beyond. Chapters: 3:21 Meet the Guests: African Music Scholars 6:03 What Are Afrobeats and Amapiano? 7:56 Afrobeats vs. Afrobeat: History & Identity 11:49 Branding, World Music, and South African Context 14:29 Recording Studios as Sites of Negotiation 17:42 Digital Networks and Diaspora Influence 23:23 Listening Practices: Streaming, Social Media, and Algorithms 29:00 Dance, Timelines, and Global Rhythms 33:13 Economic Realities and Global Music Industry Click here to read the full transcript. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Graham Reznick is a multifaceted sound designer, screenwriter, director, and musician, best known for his work on indie horror films like Ti West's X and the critically acclaimed video game Until Dawn. In this episode, Reznick discusses Rabbit Trap, a film based on Welsh folklore blending analog synthesis with supernatural soundscapes. Host Mack Hagood and Reznick begin talking about horror sound design as a technical and creative process, examining how he crafted specific uncanny soundscapes in the film. The conversation then expands to the evolving relationship between sound design and musical scores in horror films, Reznick's limited series on Shudder called "Dead Wax: A Vinyl Hunter's Tale" and a discussion of haunted media, sensory deprivation, brainwave entrainment, self-improvement tapes from the 1970s, and other Halloween-appropriate topics! Members of Phantom Power can hear our ad-free, extended version, which includes Reznick's world-record breaking work as a writer on the video game Until Dawn. Last but not least, we find ‘What’s Good?’ according to Graham, where he recommends things to read, do, and listen to! Join us at phantompod.org or mackhagood.com]! That’s also where you can also sign up for our free Phantom Power newsletter, which will drop on the second Friday of every month and feature news, reviews, and interviews not found on the podcast. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to Phantom Power 01:19 Meet Graham Reznick: Sound Designer Extraordinaire 01:59 Rabbit Trap: A Sound-Centric Horror Film 02:29 Graham Reznick's Career Highlights 04:00 Phantom Power Membership and Newsletter 04:52 Interview with Graham Reznick Begins 05:00 Rabbit Trap: Plot and Sound Design Insights 10:40 Creating the Uncanny Soundscape 14:11 The Evolution of Sound Design in Horror 20:56 Sound Design Techniques and Tools 26:33 Exploring the Fairy Circle Scene 35:48 Dead Wax: A Vinyl Hunter's Tale 39:58 The Allure of Forbidden Media 43:31 The Evolution of Online Culture 44:34 Magic, Dark Arts, and Haunted Media 46:54 Sensory Deprivation and Inner Worlds 49:25 The Power of Sound and Music 52:45 The Impact of Individualized Media For the full transcript visit: https://www.mackhagood.com/podcast/inside-the-sound-of-the-uncanny-rabbit-trap-sound-design-and-haunted-media-w-graham-reznick/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sound is an invisible force that most people rarely notice and barely understand. Dr. Mack Hagood explores the world of sound studies with the world's most amazing sound researchers, artists, and designers, as well as musicians, writers, voice actors and others. We've broken down how computers learned to talk, Yoko Ono's scream, John Cage's silence, chopped and screwed cassette tapes, the politics of EDM, film soundtracks, field recording, and audio ink blot tests for blind people. Phantom Power is the podcast that both newcomers and experts in sound studies, sound art, and acoustic ecology listen to--combining intellectual rigor and great audio. Mack Hagood is a professor of media and communication who studies audio technologies. His work and words have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Washington Post, the BBC, Freakonomics Radio, Pitchfork, and many other venues. He is the author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control and is currently writing a book about sound for Penguin Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yvette Janine Jackson is a composer and sound artist who creates immersive compositions, drawing on a wide array of genres and life experiences. Her compositions have been commissioned internationally for a variety of mediums. Yvette Jackson often works in a mode she calls radio opera, which combines orchestral composition, modular synthesis, sampling, voice acting, and improvisation. Her work has been commissioned and screened at some of the biggest festivals and events across the globe. Having learned tape splicing, analog synthesis, and computer music at the historic Columbia Computer Music Center in New York. Yvette now works as associate professor at Harvard University. In the public episode, we talk about her concept of radio opera and we take a deep dive into her album Freedom, and explore the unusual personal history that has informed her unconventional composition style—discussing things like theater sound design and her four years spent 8,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains, and how that changed the way she listens. Supporters on Patreon will get another 35 minutes where we get into the technical details of how Yvette puts these multimodal electroacoustic works together. And a discussion of composing for the Carillon, the enormous bell tower instrument. sign up to listen Patreon.com/phantompower. 00:00 Introduction 00:39 Meet Yvette Janine Jackson 02:08 Exploring Radio Opera 04:19 Yvette’s Recent Achievements 05:12 Defining the Artist 06:01 The Concept of Radio Opera 08:25 Creating Immersive Experiences 13:10 Album ‘Freedom’ and Its Themes 13:56 Narratives in ‘Freedom’ 14:16 Invisible People: A Radio Opera 19:54 Destination Freedom: A Journey 24:02 The Art of Sound and Emotion 29:10 Diving into Technical and Biographical Insights 29:51 Early Musical Influences and Education 31:57 College Years and Electronic Music Exploration 35:04 Theater and Radio Drama Experiences 40:17 Living in Colorado and Soundscape Studies 48:40 PhD Journey and Integrative Studies 50:39 Conclusion and Final Thoughts Transcript Yvette Jackson: My work has a lot of things that were presented to me at some point as binaries, like, you know, improvisation, composition, acoustic, electronic, and for me, I guess part of my practice is kind of blurring these lines. Introduction: This is Phantom Power. Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a show about sound. Sound studies. Sound art. All things sound. My name is Mac Hagood, and my guest today is Yvette Janine Jackson. Yvette Janine Jackson is a composer and sound artist who creates immersive compositions drawing on a wide array of genres and life experiences. Her electroacoustic chamber and orchestral compositions have been commissioned internationally for concert. Theater, installation and screen. Yvette Jackson often works in a mode she calls radio opera, which combines orchestral composition, modular synthesis, sampling, voice acting, improvisation, a whole lot of things in order to create what the guardian called immersive non-visual films. Her work has been commissioned by or appeared on the stages and screens of Carnegie Hall Big Years Festival. PBS and the Venice Music Bien Oh and Wave Farm. A lot of listeners will be familiar with Wave Farm, with whom Yvette has had a long history. She is also the only volunteer firefighter that I personally know who learned tape splicing analog synthesis and computer music at the Historic Columbia Computer Music Center in New York. Oh, and did I mention that she’s a professor at Harvard? Yvette and I met at the Residual Noise Festival at Brown a couple months ago, and I so enjoyed talking with her that I wanted to bring you in on the conversation. In this wide ranging chat, we talk about her concept of radio opera and we take a deep dive into her album Freedom, which the wire calls one of the most unique. Releases to chronicle the Black American experience. We then get into her unusual personal history, which has informed her unconventional composition style, and we discuss things like theater, sound design, and the four years she spent 8,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains and how that changed the way she listens. Supporters on Patreon will get another 35 minutes where we get into the technical details of how Yvette puts together these multimodal electroacoustic works. And then we get to my favorite part of the conversation in which we truly nerd out on the Caron. Which is the enormous Bell Tower instrument that she has actually composed several pieces for. And unless there is some Caron podcast out there, and I suppose there probably is, but I’m pretty sure that this is the deepest Caron conversation you’re ever going to hear. And then. Yvette does her what’s good segment where she suggests something good to read, something good to listen to, something good to do, and her picks are every bit as unconventional as you might expect from this introduction. That is all at Phantom Power’s Patreon page. patreon.com/phantom Power. You can become a member for as little as $3 a month, and we could really use your support. I’m still on this mission to try to cover the production costs for this podcast with your donation, so please consider getting all of the full length interviews at patreon.com/phantom Power. Okay, here it is, my conversation with a one of a kind human being, Yvette, Janine Jackson. Yvette, welcome to the show. Yvette Jackson: Thanks for inviting me. Mack Hagood: Yeah, so it’s been a while since we chopped it up over breakfast at the Hampton Inn. Classy, you’ve had, an amazing year. I think we are actually able to sort of break some news on this podcast that you just received a Herb Bert Award , in the arts for 2025, which is like a big $75,000 thing. Yvette Jackson: Yeah, I mean, I’m excited for multiple reasons. I mean, especially, it’s at a time when obviously, you know, arts are being cut and so it’s an honor, but also a responsibility, I think. Mack Hagood: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, I mean, I think with that was part of the conversation that we had before, it was just about the kinds of challenges and opportunities of, of trying to do creative work in this moment. Um. You also got promoted to associate professor at Harvard. That’s amazing. Yeah. Congrats. Thank you very much. I’m just gonna toot your horn for a minute year. Alright. Yeah. But maybe, maybe, um, we can just sort of start with the basics of why you’re getting these accolades and promotions, which is your work, which I, I think is just truly innovative. Can you maybe just talk a little bit about how you would describe yourself as an artist? What genres do you work in? Yvette Jackson: All right. Um, I, I feel like I’m not consistent with this answer. I was just asked this question two days ago, so I mean, I think composer and sound artist, but I’ve used different terms. Sound designer, installation artist, the composer has always been a part mm-hmm. Of that definition, and I guess musician. As well. Performer ensemble director. But yeah, I like composer. Simple. One word. Mack Hagood: Yeah. Your work, I mean, one, one word that I’ve heard you use before to describe your work is radio opera. You have this group, the radio opera workshop. Can you maybe talk a little bit about what you see? That genre as, would you call it a genre radio author? Yvette Jackson: Um, I mean, I, I think it is. I mean, the term is used in different terms now and I think it also was used. In different ways during the early days of radio because I mean, historically you can find older ads for, you know, we’ve got the first radio opera, and you can see this on ads in the US and in Europe. And usually what was meant by that term, radio opera was an opera that was being broadcast on the radio. Mm-hmm. And then you have pieces like NBC Commission, John Carlo Otti for the Old Mate and the Thief. And I think that commission was specifically for radio. So you know, as a composer, having to think about how to capture that spectacle over the air. In the minds of the listeners. Um, I use the term a little bit differently. So the radio for me is pointing to the golden age of radio drama, which I am a fan of, and then opera. Just because initially when I started using this term about 13 years ago, 14 years ago, I was. Picturing this concept as these series of large works, and so mm-hmm. Yeah. Taking these two ideas and it probably, I, I mean, I think definitely I also was influenced and maybe got this term from Anthony Davis with whom I was studying at the time that I started calling my works radio opera. Mack Hagood: He started calling your works that Yvette Jackson: No, I, I, I think the, the term came up in a conversation that we were having uhhuh. I had taken one of his opera classes and he knew about my interest in radio drama. And so, I mean, I think that there’s a connection there. And then someone also, uh, had a conversation two days ago thinking about like violin, Bret. Using radio opera and having like the audience kind of interactive and you know, an interactive component of it and singing along with it, which, I mean, initially I wasn’t thinking of any type of interactivity, which, yeah, now I am. The initial idea was I was creating these electroacoustic compositions to be experienced in the. A darkened theater as dark as the law would permit. You know, you have the exit signs there and you know, the performance instructions were often to be performed at an uncomfortable volume. And so you have people congregated in a theater, you know, black box proscenium space. They may be immediately seated next to someone they know, but. You know, also seated around strangers and then experiencing this collective listening experience in different types of venues and darkness. So you’re aware of other people’s surroundings, but maybe that’s not your focus. Although, I mean, I don’t know. I think, yeah, maybe it, it is also you do become aware of the other people. Yeah. Mack Hagood: I mean that does sort of bring to mind that. Concentrated form of listening that some radio scholars have said occurred in the early days of radio in the golden era of radio drama, where something is coming alive in the mind. And in part, it’s facilitated by the fact that there’s just one sense that’s sort of being activated. Yvette Jackson: Yeah, the idea of the Theater of the mind really is what initially drove my concept of radio opera so that, you know, bringing together the sound effects, whether, you know, they’re things I designed in A DAW or Foley, like had a creaky uh. Bedroom door that I used in a lot of pieces and a crackly radiator. So using these sound effects and the dialogue and music coming together to produce some type of image, which I mean in a way then becomes you’re asking the listener to participate because not everyone is going to choose to or be capable of or want to, you know, imagine anything. Mack Hagood: Yeah, I mean, and, and just to give people, I mean we’re definitely gonna play some, some small snippets of, of your work, but it’s kind of hard to give a sense of these pieces because they are so heterogeneous and pulling from so many different, not just genres, but sort of forms of instrumentation and modes of sort of addressing. The listener. I mean there’s elements that sound like field recordings. There are things that are modular synth sounds. There are elements that sound like noise, but then there’s also traditional European art, music things happening there. There might be a snatches of, of something that sounds a little more like contemporary r and b or something, but then like there’s gospel, like there just seems to be. Uh, just a world like you, you were sort of world building in this way that I think the, the radio opera. Term kind of gives you that sense of world building. Yvette Jackson: Yeah, I mean, maybe I should think about my practice more in terms of world building. I mean, occasionally I do consciously think of it that way. Uhhuh. Um, I think initially I was concerned and interested about the expression of identity through sound. And, you know, I’ve been exposed to a lot of. Things and ways of seeing the world. And I think that comes through in the music, but also thinking about the way I was raised, educated, not just formally in a school, but culturally, societally. Hmm. I mean, I, I guess, for example, my work has a lot of things that were presented to me at some point as binaries. Like, you know, improvisation, composition, acoustic, electronic. And for me, I guess part of my practice is kind of. Blurring these lines because I, I, I felt like I’ve always been told by someone, not that you need to listen to anybody telling you anything. Yeah. That, you know, you can do this or you can do that. And I’m like, why can’t I do both or all 12 of these things or whatever. Or, you know, Yvette, you should focus and narrow down on this one specific thing. And I think radio opera is something that allows me to bring together all these things that. External voices have told me that I can’t do all of these things. I’m like, oh yeah. Um, yeah. So it’s a way to do that. And then also to be able to, as radio opera becomes more of a social activity for me, if I can call it that. Um, it becomes a way to interact with more and more people like Yeah, different types of people, which I find interesting. And including the listener. ’cause the listener is a collaborator as well. Mack Hagood: I mean, your 2021 album was called Freedom. And you know, I think it’s speaking thematically to some very serious issues about freedom. Um, I think on both sides of the record, but it also is expressive of that kind of freedom to just transgress binaries and boundaries as you choose. And it’s more powerful for doing that. Definitely. Yvette Jackson: I mean, yeah, I think this exploration of freedom comes on multiple levels. I mean, I think more recently thinking about freedom just in like forms of expression or questioning what, what exactly is meant by freedom, and I think maybe each conversation has to redefine it because it’s used in so many ways. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mack Hagood: Would, do you wanna talk about the narratives on, if we talk about radio opera being a narrative, could we maybe talk about the narratives on each side of this record? The first side is called Destination Freedom. I. Yvette Jackson: Sure. Um, yeah, the first side is estimation freedom, but I’ll start with the, with the B side, invisible people. Okay. A radio opera, because that was the first piece composition that I used this term, radio opera. Oh, really? Um, yeah. To describe it, you are 10,000 times more amenable in his eyes than the most hateful. Venomous servant is in ours. Yvette Jackson: I mean, the full title of what’s on the album is Invisible People, and then parenthetically a radio opera. Then I think there’s like a colon episode one. Um, uh, oh. See, I for, I’ve forgotten my own title. It’s so long, but the fact that it’s called episode one. That’s really the third iteration of Invisible people. The first piece started out as a 10 minute tech sound composition using a lot of the sound bites that end up on the album and that have been a part of kind of subsequent iterations of the composition. So the piece. Started, um, around the time that Barack Obama had approved marriage equality. And at the time, as I said, I was, I was working with Anthony Davis and he nudged me to like find a topic that was meaningful to me. Um, and so I started. Just kind of having conversations about the topic. So yeah, my process is conversations with people, um, kind of armchair investigating, you know, looking up things on the internet, YouTube websites, looking at historical text, which all then be kind of come source material for this composition. So initially it started off as an essay, which featured different. Voices of politicians and religious figures, academics responding to Barack Obama’s approval of marriage equality. But the title, invisible People, was really pointing to all the people that the media left out of this conversation, which I thought were like the center of, you know, this focus. And so I became. Intrigued by the voices, I guess the media choose to highlight or the voices people choose to listen to in certain situations. And what about everyday people? Mm-hmm. Who somehow become invisible in certain situations. So that, that was side B. Mack Hagood: Well, that, and, and just to spell it out a little bit more, like there’s a lot of samples of voices of. Preachers and, uh, I sound, I thought I recognized the voice of Louis Farrakhan. Like there, there are people from the pulpit decrying marriage equality and the decision that Obama made. Yvette Jackson: I work with F Techs in the way that playwright Charles me does. I used to do sound for theater, so a lot of the techniques I got come from that period. And so. Yes, it includes, you know, I include politicians and as you said, spiritual leaders, clergy, um, but also internet trolls. Mm-hmm. People from the present and the past. I try to collect as many voices as possible. Obviously, there’s still some kind of framing by me as the composer, so I try to show multiple sides, but the mere fact that I’m one person, putting these together introduces some type of bias, but. There’s this collection of voices. Even when you hear actors or non-actor speaking these lines, they’re taken from things that have, yeah, I could have read in the comments of a YouTube video or some historical document. Mm-hmm. And I, you know, I may change a word or two, but for the most part, I try to stick with what people have actually said. You know, without. To do it as, as carefully as I, as I can do without running into any issues. Mack Hagood: Well, I mean, the, the comments kinda speak for themselves and, but I mean, Yvette Jackson: I mean, then I’m also, I mean, there’s the comments that are on the recording, but then I’m also interested in the comments and the conversations that happen after the recording. It may be. I should clarify. When I say recording, I mean I’m thinking about these initial performances, which were in the dark in theater with multichannel surrounding the listener. I always, or I usually am, if I see any live performance, I’m at the back of the house, which kind of comes from this habit of. When I used to run sound for live performances, I like to see the audience as part of that performance. And so with invisible people, especially those first few performances of the fixed media, seeing how people respond, you know, are they squirming? Like sometimes people wanna laugh at parts ’cause there are some moments of humor, but then. Because it’s so serious. People may be afraid to laugh. And so, I mean, and then that comes in with the collective listening, like how you might respond to something while listening by yourself versus listening surrounded by friends, surrounded by strangers in darkness, but aware of other bodies. These all play a role and I think they’re all a part of what it is that I’m calling radio opera. Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. So while we’re at it, you wanna talk about side A. As well. Yvette Jackson: Yeah. Site a destination. Freedom is a journey because invisible people was so text heavy. I was curious about this idea of telling a story without relying on words. And so I mean, there, there are voices embedded in there, but they’re not intelligible. That is by design. So there’s kind of a predecessor to Destination Freedom called swan, which is like a, it’s just under 10 minute piece, which again, the source materials for that. I have an ensemble, so there’s studio sessions at the ensemble. But I don’t use the mixture, you know, polished recordings from the ensemble. I may use, you know, the overhead mics on the drums to capture the cello and use that. Mm-hmm. Or, you know, there’s a part in there which I find really beautiful, which was before the percussionist was ready, you know, he was still moving something and he got like this kind of clunking thing that sounded like changes. Oh, yeah. Which to me then fit with the narrative. So the, the narrative for both pieces told him three. Kind of sections starts in the hold of a cargo ship trafficking Africans to the Americas, that it’s kind of this disorienting middle section and then kind of thrust you forward to this kind of cathartic release. You know, like this search for freedom and what feels like this cathartic arrival to it. And in my mind, in both pieces, there’s kind of like a coda because history repeats itself. But yeah, so. Destination freedom is basically an expansion of that idea. And I think what gets introduced with this is, I guess, the version of me as a performer of modular synthesizers. Mm-hmm. And so I still have the chamber ensemble, but then I have kind of these improvise synthesize sessions. Like I said, there’s, there are voices in there, but they’re very unintelligible. And there’s actually some moments of kind of like sound design, like working with, um, the modular synth where. It’s kind of like this auditory illusion of like, I hear voices in, in there, but there, but there’s actually not any voices, which I think points to kind of a larger thing I’m interested in is like getting electronic sounds to sound acoustic and acoustic sounds to sound electronic. Getting beautiful things to sound ugly and ugly things to sound beautiful. ’cause really it’s just a shifting, like you’re just shifting one’s frame. The way you experience the world like. The world itself is not changing. How you view the world is changing. Mack Hagood: I mean, this raises a question that I just never cease to be fascinated with when it comes to sound art and experimental music. Because so much of it is conceptual today. Right? And it seems to me that it’s sort of like the way that the conceptual concerns of an artist get translated into something we actually hear is sort of what defines. The contemporary artist. And what I think is so interesting is that like on side A and side B, there’s two, as you suggested, like totally opposite strategies. Like one is very textual and we know precisely what’s happening. Well, not precisely, but we have a very strong sense of the concerns that brought you to the table here. Right? Whereas the other one is telling. A, a nar, there’s still a narrative there, but it’s through sound. And if you didn’t know the title of the piece, you know it, the, I guess the question is, will some listeners know what’s fully happening or not? Or would they be relating to it on another level? And I just find that fascinating, these differing strategies. Yvette Jackson: I mean, I think in some ways Destination Freedom is more accessible, even though, I mean, there’s no text to guide the listener, or maybe I’m suggesting that because there’s no text to guide the listener, it can be more accessible. I mean, uh, in Workshops of swan, which was the predecessor, one of the participants was like, there’s no way you’re going to get people to know what it’s like in the hold of a cargo ship. Mm-hmm. And I’m like, well. First of all, I’m not trying to force people to have any feeling or think or you know, experience. What I anticipate is that people are gonna come in with their own lived experiences and preexisting knowledge, and I. Their framing of the audio is going to be based on that. So each person is going to interpret this in a different way. And that is okay, like that’s, that’s what I’m more curious and excited about is like, what is it that you are hearing in this piece? What are you experiencing? So even. On the text, heavy invisible people. It has different meaning. If you recognize the voices well. Okay. If you speak the language, if you recognize the voices, yeah. If you’ve lived through certain experiences. Some of my works can be triggering, so if you’ve had certain experiences, uh, maybe they’re harder to listen to than other types of things. But yeah, I mean this is something that I’m interested in. It’s like language and the absence of language are. I was going to kind of put myself down a, a trap in some linguists, it’d be like, oh, that’s not what language is. Um, uh, but I mean, I mean, I don’t wanna go into the thing where people say, oh, music is a language. Because I mean, I think that’s definitely where the linguists will come in and say, no, it’s not a language because of X, Y, and Z. But I think maybe the communication is. Maybe more about kind of emotional or I think about emotional contour during the compositional stages than any kind of semantic meaning from text or even program notes. ’cause of the program notes. I upset people ’cause I don’t like to have program notes. Um, Mack Hagood: well in fact, you, you told me like, um, because you have a German language radio opera coming up soon and you’re like, I don’t wanna talk about it. I don’t like to talk about my work before. People hear it. Yvette Jackson: Well, I mean, yeah, I mean that, that project is in process for Deutsche Couture and it’s, I guess, the English title for its backspace, like, you know, on a keyboard, but can have like a, a double meaning, but with this, like I’m taking an extra time to, because I do want to, I. Have meanings in German language. But then I’m also thinking about like the types of voices and like if and how class can be reflected through a language that is not my own. Mm-hmm. And the challenges of that and like how listeners perceive that. I mean, a lot of the times my, my projects, my radio operas are, are abstract any, a lot of the times, all the time. My, my radio operas are abstract. Um, and. Uh, something you said in your previous kind of lead up to the question made me think about like, even, even the term radio opera, some people get upset by it, like, you know, why is she using the term. Opera. I don’t hear people singing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or, you know, are your pieces on radio? I mean, some pieces have been played on radio, but the early pieces were not specifically or explicitly composed with radio in mind. Mm-hmm. Whereas this German radio opera that I’m working on now, um, I’m, you know, very aware about like the radio audience and I mean, and that, that’s what makes it exciting also. ’cause like. It’s kind of like my mante moment of composing something explicitly for radio. Mack Hagood: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I I, that’s really exciting. Um, I’m like torn in two directions right now. Like I wanna, I. Ask you a bunch of sort of technical questions about how you do what you do. And I also wanna sort of get the background because you’ve hinted at certain experiences in your life in the past, like being a theater sound designer that I also want to dig into. So maybe let’s go. With the biographical piece, and then we’ll come back to all my techier. Yvette Jackson: Sure. Mack Hagood: Nuts in bolts questions. It all Yvette Jackson: started when my parents met. No. Um, let’s see. Well, I mean, I won’t go, I won’t go that far. Um, but you’re from la, right? Yeah, yeah. I’m from la. Um, and I grew up, um, uh, I, I guess I was lucky to grow up in a household. With a piano and I had like a, it was my paternal grandfather’s guitar that really wasn’t strung properly, or, yeah, I mean, my mother didn’t know how to string it. I had, she had like a, I still have it, um, in my living room, but it’s like a box set on vinyl for like guitar lessons, which I’m not sure how one really learns guitar from a box set album, but I would love to hear that. I do still have it. Um. But anyway, I, I, I didn’t learn through that method, but I mean, I guess I took lessons. On and off from an early age at the community school. So I was, I guess what I’m saying is I was su supported and exposed to music, both through different types of private lessons, through piano, you know, music fundamentals, and eventually switching to trumpet, which I had become aware of in elementary school. So my public school was part of a magnet program. It was like a super phenomenal experience. Like I, I also have a 45 that we recorded. It was like a bunch of 9-year-old singing bar talk, if you can, if you wanna hear that. Um, but, but like, I mean, like how many nine year olds have this experience of like, you know, through a public school going into a recording studio and having a really good public school music program. You know, having the privilege of also being supported with private lessons through the community school. And then at one point there was an older woman across the street who I had violin lessons with and you know, had instruments in the house. As I’m talking, I’m like, I think at one point my paternal grandparents gave me one of those like toys, us drum sets, which magically disappeared. Um, uh, so, um, yeah, just having that support and I. I, I knew that composition was something I wanted to do and I always thought probably was thinking about it in terms of like film or tv, because I don’t know la that’s the industry there. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And then at college, you know, studying composition and. One year, I’m like, what are these electronic music classes? And went up to Princess Hall at the time was like transitioning from the Columbia, Princeton Electronic Music Center to the computer music center. Mm-hmm. And, you know, so, um, Brad Garten was starting out there and. There was something like really exciting about that space. It was like engineers and musicians, but they’re, you’re encouraged to like explore and learn from trial and error, which was a lot different than in the formal music classes where, you know, you’re following all these rules and. Oh, you, you know, doubled the wrong note or, you know, something like that. Which, I mean, I, I, I, I, I love theory, I love, I love rules, but like, there was also something just liberating about this experience and hearing one of Brad’s compositions where it’s like he’s, you could hear him washing dishes like I hadn’t heard. Things that were called music that were like this. And Mack Hagood: so who was the instructor? Uh, Yvette Jackson: Brad Garten was, uh, one of the main people at the time, and I also took. I think it was like the last class where we were learning on reel to reel tape. So it was taught by Arthur Krieger. And so we’d get assignments with, you know, use these two oscillators and create a metallic sound that turns into a watery sound. And you know, this is the rhythm. And it was like trial and error. I mean, maybe there was a lot more instruction there, but my whatever, 20-year-old, 19-year-old brain was only absorbing so much. But that experience with the real reveal. Still is important because I think about like this tactile experience of like actually splicing tape and like flipping things around and Mack Hagood: splicing it at an angle. Yeah, it’s, you get the transition. Yeah. And like, you know, the grease Yvette Jackson: pencil and all of that. I. Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. I, I just barely too got, got a little bit of that, you know, from working in radio, like a part-time job and, Yvette Jackson: yeah. Mack Hagood: Um, so that, I mean, that was a really Yvette Jackson: great experience and, and it did come to serve me two other periods in my life, but also my first introduction to computer music. I mean, we’re using like RTC mix, so. Programming like a line at a time, like play this sound for this duration at this amplitude like kind of approach to sound before I started working with other tools and I think maybe at that time, like I, I had digital performer, but I feel like at that point, I mean someone can fact check me, but I feel like that. It might have been even MIDI only at that time. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And then they added the audio to it. Mm-hmm. And so, mm-hmm. Like just kind of looking back through this conversation, like these three different types of exposure to sound making that were a lot different than the rules and the type of. Ways of practicing that I had been trained on earlier. And so I really relished in that. And then going from that college experience back to California, I eventually moved up to the San Francisco Bay area and got involved with like theater and radio drama there. There’s a group, Pachi Fool Run by Kevin Beam. Many Bera and you know, we did things at the radio station and that was a learning experience. Like, you know, showing up to record live radio dramas and. Being like, where are the microphones? Well, that was my job. Oops. I forgot to like unscrew the mics and bring them from the rehearsal spot to the studio. But like sound effects being manipulated, live with the actors there and running sound for theater places like Magic Theater and like Aurora Theater and Berkeley, Oakland Public Theater. Um, all of these experiences were great because again, it kind of gave me this bird’s eye view from being in the sound booth. And the very first piece I ran sound for. My good friend David Molina was the sound designer and it was like three hours of just like dense stacked sounds like with mini disc players and CD players. And I think there might have been a live mic and I screwed up the first show ’cause like they literally, they, they grabbed me from the, I was working in the box office. They grabbed me there the first day, threw me in the booth ’cause I think it was. Previews that that night, and they didn’t have someone to run sound. And so it was like learning, like learning how to swim by throwing a kid into the water. Yeah. Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. And did you have a, like a, a physical cue book that you were paging through the script with? And we Yvette Jackson: had a book, but I was in the booth. So on one side was the lighting up, then the stage manager, and then I was on the other side. So it’s pretty cramped in there. So yeah, the first couple of months you’d hear horses. Scalloping when there were no horses in the scene and stuff like that. But by the time I got this rhythm of it, I began to think of the soundboard as like this instrument. And like, you know, the stage manager is the conductor, the sound designer’s, the composer. And that kind of expanded my desire to, I guess it like there’s this shift between like wanting to compose for theater, to wanting to compose theater. And I think just to back up once more, I think that experience at Columbia, I started to get that because like some of my earlier pieces, which like I have. On a deck somewhere. Um, but like these earlier pieces, like I would use soundbites from 10 10 wins and pieces of instrumental music, like there are some Lionel Richie and Rashan Roland Kirk mm-hmm. Samples in the pieces. I mean, I think you might’ve, I can’t remember if I shared a piece, um, when we were at residual noise at Brown. I don’t, I don’t make it publicly available, but I have shared it in a couple of like smaller talks to show this kind of earlier It is radio opera. I just wasn’t calling it that, you know? Yeah. 20 years before, or, Mack Hagood: I mean, you, I’m, I’m kind of getting chills just because I studied theater and did directing, did. Sound design and there’s just nothing like that space of the Black Box theater and even just, you know, being the sound op and just, there’s something I found so meditative. I. About being in that dark, cool space and just hitting your cues at the right time and following along with, with what’s happening on stage and then just the collaboration and, and creativity, you know, of getting your friends to. To, um, I mean, when, when Brush of Frame fame of mine was like, I, I was, uh, directing a play for a, a glass project and I had Brian Blade who was studying jazz at my university, like on drums there for a while, and he was like playing the walls of the black box theater awesome. And stuff. It was completely amazing, right? It’s just like. Those little moments of like, sort of crossing paths with people and, and, and, and just creating something that’s ephemeral and then goes away. I don’t know. I, I, I could see why that was inspirational. For you and, and, and something that you wanted to retain in your work after having that experience? Yvette Jackson: Yeah, I mean, I learned a lot from just, yeah, watching other designers, especially lighting designers. Um mm-hmm. And I’m hoping like, as I expand this idea of radio opera to include movement and lights, like Heather Baab was a lighting designer. I, I worked with a lot when I was getting started and like, I’m like, hey. I have this idea coming up, would you wanna be a part of it? Because like, it’s kind of like if you think about like film or theater where sounds often is added at the last minute. Yeah. Like I don’t, I don’t wanna do that with the lighting or like any type of visuals. I want that to be part of the compositional process from the very beginning. And so yeah, as radio opera becomes more collaborative for me reaching out to people earlier in that process. Mack Hagood: Yeah. So after that stint in the Bay Area, is that when you go down to San Diego? Yvette Jackson: Actually, uh, lived off the grid, well, not technically off the grid, kind of. I lived in the mountains at 8,000 feet in Colorado. Um, oh. And that period was important because my listening shifted in different ways. And I think that’s kind of what primed me for the following interest in, in kind of soundscape studies because you know, especially those first few weeks or months of, I mean the town itself was a hundred people and then the outlying this kind of a land trust outside of it at. More of a transient population and an out of it. Mack Hagood: How did you, you gotta explain, like what, how did you wind up, um, in Colorado? Well, okay, so Yvette Jackson: at, at the time I was a webcast and production director at Grace Cathedral for four years, and a lot of the time spending like 60 hours a week in the basement with black walls and the windows. And then I’d go home to my apartment on Van Ness and Eddie, which was like Van Ness. It’s basically when the 1 0 1 goes through San Francisco. So it was like just hearing people scream and traffic accidents and just like, a lot of it was just like no windows and noise. Um, like a former partner was going to study with someone. In Colorado and wanted someone to like watch her kids. And I’m like, Hey, I’ll do it. Um, well I didn’t say that immediately because I don’t, I don’t like to disappoint kids ever. So I wanted to make sure I would, it was actually something I was gonna commit to, but then I’m like, I’ll do it. And so we were out in the middle of very rural Colorado and it was just like. One of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It was also one of my, yeah, it was the only time I’ve lived, not near a coast, and I love water, so I mean, there, you know, there’s big rivers there as well. So, I mean, I did have like river access to water, so I, I went there for that summer and then I’m like, I’m moving here. And everyone’s like, ha ha ha ha ha, that’s Yvette. And another wild thing she’s saying. And so yeah, I moved there for four years. I initially had this idea of like, I would compose and like have this home studio, but like actually having no business skills at all or understanding how to take care of a home in the winter. So I let it flood twice from frozen pipes and I’m glad I didn’t put the studio in the basement because I would’ve like, yeah. Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yvette Jackson: Lost everything anyway. Um, Mack Hagood: so how did you support yourself for those four years? Yvette Jackson: Uh, I went into debt and debt and debt. I didn’t know how. Yeah. So it was a lesson learned about like business skills and, and musicians and fantasies about being a starving artist. Um, when I first moved there, I joined the local fire department because I’m like, if I’m gonna live in this many. Trees in a dry area. I would like to know like how to protect myself and others in the land around. So I’ve met people through the volunteer fire department and one of those people happened to be the superintendent of the school in the next town. So I. Taught K through 12 at the local public school. Mm. Yvette Jackson: Which is also like another way of just kind of expanding the way I was working with sound and music through that experience. And then at one point, I guess three years into my four years there, I came to California, a friend and I shared birthdays. And so, you know, we had these kind of co birthday parties where I was meeting all of these other music people. And, uh, one of the gifts I got was like tuition for, uh, like the Send Mat summer program where they, you know, do Maxim, SP and all, and all of that. And, um, David was, was still around at that time. And so it was through those interactions that I’m like, okay, finally I’m gonna apply to grad school, which is something I said I was gonna do 15 years ago when I had moved up to the Bay Area. And so someone, I don’t know who mentioned Anthony Davis, I think. Somehow I got, I think it was some kind of trumpet connection where I got pointed to Jeff Kaiser, who then, who was studying there at the time, who pointed me to Anthony Davis and we talked. And um, yeah, that’s when I got into this other type of weird music making, because I think at Columbia there was weird music making. And then in San Francisco, the people I hung around with, like David Molina’s, you know, that was weird music making. And I was making music in Colorado. I wouldn’t call that as weird, but um. Um, I guess, yeah, we, I mean we did some experimental things too. Mack Hagood: Did you learn, because you said you were sort of, that Colorado changed your experience of sound in some way or made you wanna think more about like soundscapes does sound. Travel differently at 8,000 feet. Yvette Jackson: It definitely travels, definitely in the winter. Um, when it’s cold. I mean, like there it would be, I mean, some long stretches of like negative 20 degrees. And now I’m gonna say that ironic, or, I dunno if it’s ironic, but like when people are like, oh, but it’s, it’s a dry cold. Right? Right. Or they say it for heat, they usually say it for heat. It’s a dry heat. I feel the same, like a dry cold, like I complained less in like negative. Degrees in Colorado than I did at like 50 degrees. San Francisco a hundred percent. Same with New Orleans. Mack Hagood: You go to New Orleans. I, I, I lived in Chicago for a decade. I’d go down to New Orleans during the winter, and it’s much warmer, but it’s so damp. I would be freezing in New Orleans. Yvette Jackson: Yeah. Um, but I mean, I, I began to listen, I guess, to the. This is prior to me knowing anything about like r Murray Schaeffer and, and maybe I did come across his name in college, but it wasn’t something that was like in my mind or thinking about soundscapes or soundscape composition at that point. So like, I guess I was coming up with my own language for things that. Again, maybe these seeds had been planted in college or from collaborators in the Bay Area. Mm-hmm. But I wasn’t as aware, so like listening to like, just kind of, I almost got like almost started shivering. Like the sound of like June bucks. Like they make this gross hissing sound, chipmunks make a sound that I never knew. Well I guess I hadn’t really been around like chipmunks and, you know, squirrels and deer and bear. Um. All kinds of things. And so like it got to a point where like, you know, my first couple of weeks, like, I’m not gonna call it silence, but the shift in the soundscape made me very nervous, especially at night sleeping in this town that I went to without knowing anybody in the middle of like in thousand feet isolated. Um, like worried about like. Bears coming on my steps and things like that, um, to by the end of that four years when I could hear the sounds of kind of people. Playing in the park and laughter coming through my windows, I’m like, oh, that’s so noisy. Um, but then when I got back to San Diego, LA Jolla area, like I found it, the noisiest place I had ever lived. And that’s after like growing up in LA and going to school in New York and living in San Francisco, like, it was like, you know, you’ve got like, you know, the. Primary industry is military, so you have the jets flying over all the time. There’s like military and tourist helicopters, there’s like constant leaf blowers. There’re um, you know, just all of these sounds that I became extremely sensitive to, which I assume probably. It was because of that juxtaposition temporarily of one experience to the other. And so I started becoming really intrigued by the invasion of kind of external sounds on one’s physiological and like mental health because like you can. Close the door, but like these kind of lower frequencies are these trucks that are just idling. You’re still fueling those vibrations. Mm-hmm. Um, and so yeah, this, that kind of study, you can definitely hear in some of my pieces around like 2012. A lot of these field recordings are like, I’m recording in my domestic space, but I’m capturing all these sounds from the outside that become a part of it, but then also like incorporating these lower frequencies into my music. As well. Hmm. Um, yeah, so I think, yeah, like, like I mentioned, darkness was a ear a, an important part of these early pieces, but darkness and low frequencies. Mack Hagood: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you do make powerful use of low frequencies this period of time. So you mentioned San Diego, this is when you do your PhD Yes. Uh, at UCSD. And you don’t go into a composition program per se, right. Yvette Jackson: No, I mean, when I was, when I was looking at schools, I had looked at several places. I had looked at like theater sound design programs. I had looked at composition programs. And this program, which at the time was called CSEP, critical Studies and Experimental Practice, and by the time I started that program was being rebranded as integrative studies. Mm. And so I think I joined during the second year. Of that program. And so, uh, the premise behind this program is that there were four kind of subcategories, systems, inquiry, critical musicology, ethnomusicology and creative practice. And you, you get exposed to all four during the first year, but then you focus in on two of those. So I did, you know, my master’s and PhD there. And so. Getting exposure to kind of all of these different ways of thinking about sound. And Mack Hagood: what were your two focus areas? Yvette Jackson: I think for my master’s they were creative practice and ethnomusicology. And then for the PhD creative practice and systems inquiry. But I mean, Mack Hagood: and isn’t, uh, king Britt a professor of computer music over there as well? Yvette Jackson: King Britt joined the faculty at UCSD the same year I started at Harvard. So we were able to kind of like connect. I guess kind of from the perspectives of, of starting at new institutions at the same time and right before the pandemic. Yeah. And so I’ve been back to San Diego I think a couple of times and got to meet with King Britt and he invited me to perform on his electron stage at Big Ears. So Wow. Like I really admire what he’s doing, um, there and kind of wish I had overlapped as a student there. Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. He seems pretty incredible. Yvette Jackson: Yeah. Mack Hagood: Well thanks for the little, uh, tour through your life. And it, and it is, it’s an interesting one. You definitely cut your own trail. Um, yeah, but, and Yvette Jackson: I, but I think that that goes back to what you were saying, like, my music has all of these different things. It does. Well, my life is at all these different things, like Yeah. Yeah. And so how to, how to bring all these things together. ’cause when I feel like, when people discourage me and like, oh, you can’t do that, and that it’s like. What I hear is like, you can’t exist because I am these multiple things. Mack Hagood: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of bringing all these multiple things together, I, maybe we can talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how you do that. Like, so if we’re talking about, you know, a radio opera and it’s this collaborative enterprise, but you’re drawing on these modular synths and field recordings and, and. Different musicians and digital software, like where do these compositions live? Like did they, do they live in a da? Do they get written on paper? Like where, where are they born and where do they live? Yvette Jackson: That’s a super great question. Mack Hagood: It was a good question, and Yvette gave a good answer too. And if you want to get into the nitty gritty of how she collaborates on these complex radio dramas. You’ll need to join the Patreon. You’ll also get that really interesting conversation about the Caron and Yvette’s. What’s good? Just go to patreon.com/phantom Power. You’ll get all of our full length conversations, including this one. The post Radio Opera Redefined: Immersive Sound, Improvisation, and Sonic Freedom w/ Yvette Janine Jackson appeared first on Phantom Power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

University of Delaware historian David Suisman is known for his research on music and capitalism, particularly his excellent book Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard UP, 2009), which won numerous awards and accolades. Suisman’s new book, Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers (U Chicago Press, 2024), brings that same erudition to the subject of music in the military. It is the most comprehensive look at military music to date, full of fascinating historical anecdotes and insights on what music does for military states and their soldiers. Our conversation explores music as a martial technology, used for purposes of morale, discipline, indoctrination, entertainment, emotional relief, psychological warfare, and torture. In the public episode David and I talk about the military’s use of music from the Civil War through World War Two. Our Patrons will also hear David’s critique of how we think about music in the Vietnam War–he says Hollywood has completely misinformed us on the role of music in that conflict. We’ll also talk about the iPod and our more recent conflicts in the Middle East, and hear a detailed discussion of David’s research and writing methods, plus his reading and listening recommendations. If you’re not a Patron, you can hear the full version, plus all of our other bonus content for just a few bucks a month–sign up at Patreon.com/phantompower. 00:00 Introduction 04:20 The US Military’s Investment in Music 05:30 Music’s Role in Soldier Training and Discipline 12:32 The Evolution of Military Cadences 23:22 The Civil War: A Turning Point for Military Music 28:21 Forgotten Brass Instruments of the Union Army 29:38 The Role of Drummer Boys in the Civil War 33:32 Music and Morale in World War I 35:48 Group Singing and Community Singing Movement 37:28 The YMCA’s Role in Soldier Recreation 38:41 Racial Dynamics and Minstrel Shows in Military Music 41:47 Music Consumption and the Military in World War II 45:27 The USO and Live Entertainment for Troops 49:56 Vietnam War: Challenging Musical Myths 50:26 Conclusion and Call to Support the Podcast Transcript ​[00:00:00] David Suisman: I describe music as functioning in some ways as a lubricant in the American War machine. It makes the machine function or allows the machine to function. It enables the machine to function. Introduction: This is Phantom Power. Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a podcast about sound. I’m Mack Hagood. I just noticed that this month makes seven years that we’ve been doing this podcast, which feels like a pretty nice milestone. And in that time, we’ve really tried to keep the focus on sound as opposed to music. There are a lot of fantastic podcasts about music, not nearly as many taking a really deeply nerdy approach to [00:01:00] questions about sound. And so that’s been our lane. That said, no one has managed to build a wall or police the border between sound and music. It’s a pretty fuzzy boundary and we’ve definitely spent a lot of episodes exploring that fuzzy boundary between the two. And I guess the reason I bring this up is that this season has actually been Pretty musical so far. Our first episode this season was with Eric Salvaggio. We were talking about AI and its implications for music and then our second episode, with Liz Pelley, looked into the effects of Spotify on how we listen to music. So two shows about how new sound technologies are reshaping music. Today’s show puts a slightly different spin on the relationship between music and technology. Today, we’re looking at music as a technology. A technology of war. My guest today is [00:02:00] University of Delaware historian, David Suisman. David is probably best known for his research on the history of music and capitalism. Especially his excellent book, “Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music” that’s probably his best known work. Now, he’s bringing that same kind of erudition to the subject of music in the military. His new book is called Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers. Long time listeners will know that I sometimes get a little cranky about music scholars and media scholars and the ways that we often focus on the kind of content that we like. We get a little fannish, we want to think about things like music as a force of self expression and political liberation. Of course, music can be those things, but music can also be a technology of domination, of indoctrination, of disciplinarity, even [00:03:00] torture. And David Suisman’s “Instrument of War” is the most comprehensive look at military music that I’m aware of. If the subject matter sounds a bit grim, you’ll be happy to hear that this book is full of fascinating historical anecdotes. And in the public episode of this show, David and I are going to talk about the military’s use of music from the civil war all the way through World War II. Our patrons will also hear David’s critique of how we think about music in the Vietnam War. He says that Hollywood has completely misinformed us on the way music worked in that war. We’ll also talk about the iPod and our more recent conflicts in the Middle East and hear a detailed discussion of David’s research and writing methods, plus his reading and listening recommendations. If you’re not a patron, you can hear all of that material plus all of our other bonus content for just a few bucks a month. Sign up at [00:04:00] patreon.com/phantompower Okay, so without further ado, here’s my interview with historian David Suisman. David, welcome to the show. David Suisman: Thank you Mack. It’s great to be here. Mack Hagood: Your opening sentence concerns a rather staggering figure about the United States military budget. Could you maybe tell us about that. David Suisman: It stopped me dead in my tracks when I found this little factoid in the course of my research. And that is that in 2015, 10 years ago, the US Congress allocated some $437 million to music by military bands and not just a raw number, but that was about three times the size of the entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Just let that sink in for a second. Like the government was spending almost three times as much on military music as all other support [00:05:00] for the arts combined. That really knocked me out. Mack Hagood: It’s really incredible, and I love this as a strategy for opening a book because the number just speaks for itself, right? It boldly proclaims the stakes of the book for one thing, right? If music wasn’t perceived as deadly serious by the Pentagon, they really wouldn’t be spending this kind of money and fighting budget hawks on this issue since the Civil War, right? There have been skeptics about the value of music to the military. But it also signals to scholars, to music scholars, that the military should really be front and center in our research agenda as well, right? David Suisman: Yeah, Mack Hagood: Why hasn’t it been? David Suisman: Sound studies has done a lot of really creative work. but the state has not been very present in a lot of scholars’ frameworks. And one of the things that I was seeking to do, or one of the things that I was exploring in the course of working on this whole project, was trying to understand the [00:06:00] relationship between sound and the state. I was thinking the state is important in the construction of modern, social formation. And so what is the role of sound in it? And what is, what does sound mean for the state? These were pretty abstract questions that I didn’t know how to answer for a long time. And then I found a few different places where they were manifested, but one of them was in thinking about music in the military. That was one of the places where the military is so important to the constitution of the state and the function of the state. And sound in the form of music being so central I realized, to the military. So that’s how I came to it and why I think it makes sense for the scholarship Mack Hagood: And there’s certainly been some good research done. I’m thinking of Suzaane Cusik’s.. David Suisman: Acoustics work Mack Hagood: Acoustics work on musical torture, or Martin Daughtry’s work in his book “Listening to War” but in terms of a comprehensive study [00:07:00] of how music has been used by the United States military, I’m not familiar with any other book that really does this work. David Suisman: There is surprisingly little on music in the military that’s not about, particularly songs, when people have written about music in the military, it’s often been song focused. About song lyrics, essentially. And, as I’m sure we’ll talk about, my book is much broader. More capacious than that. Mack Hagood: Well, in fact that’s really why I thought it was a good fit for a sound studies podcast like this because, you don’t really focus on musical compositions or composers. Like I was really surprised at how little oral estate John Phillips Souza gets, David Suisman: Of mentions, yeah. Mack Hagood: But instead you’re really interested in, music as a sonic technology that’s used by the military on one hand, and then also by soldiers themselves or service members themselves on the other hand David Suisman: Yeah that’s exactly it. I’m [00:08:00] really interested in how music itself works as a technology, not about music technologies, as we usually use the term, but how music is used as a technology by the military to advance the military’s aims in war making. And it does so in this dialectical way, it works as a top down tool of the institution. It functions to train and condition and discipline soldiers, and then as a bottom up tool of the rank and file, to basically address their own emotional and psychic needs. And these two work in concert with one another to keep the military going. I describe music as functioning in some ways as a lubricant in the American War machine. It makes the machine function or allows the machine to function. It enables the machine to function. So in this respect, what I was interested in doing was looking past musical compositions or composers and thinking about what music [00:09:00] does in this, very Christopher Small musicking way Mack Hagood: Talk a little bit about that, for those who don’t know Small’s work, that concept of musicking? David Suisman: Yeah, he was a musicologist who posited that. It’s more constructive to think about music as a verb than a noun. And thinking about music as process more than product, as a kind of set of relationships that exists among people. And those people involve performers and or composers and performers and listeners, but also musical instrument makers and music publishers. And in this case military officials who allow for music or promote music or tolerate music in the ranks. And that they are all responsible in this sort of interconnected way, in this complex, interconnected way for the phenomenon of music, which I don’t think he says this exactly, but one of the things I derive from his work is that you can’t really think about music [00:10:00] in the abstract. Whenever you think about music in the abstract, it’s always a kind of music in particular. That particularity varies, but music is something that exists in particular times and places. And so I’m thinking about music in action like Bruno Latour did with science. And, thinking about particular times and places, what is music? What is musical activity? And that’s what I sought and the way that I sought to explore music in the military, in the book. Mack Hagood: Yeah, absolutely. I would say another touchstone is, Foucalt’s work and thinking about disciplining the soldier. You do mention Foucalt’s “Discipline and Punish” As I recall, it talks about soldiers quite specifically and this sort of has an argument that in the 17th century soldiers were found, right? You looked for the man with a certain kind of body, who looked like a soldier that would be an effective soldier. And then by the end of the 18th century, soldiers were something that were made. [00:11:00] You found techniques to discipline the bodies of men and turn them into, what he calls a docile body. A body that can be made useful, a body that can be organized in space and in time. And I think you show really persuasively that music is capable of doing that kind of work, and in fact, it’s probably essential to it. David Suisman: Yeah, it’s been really important. And if you think about stepping back for a second, one of the things that the modern nation state does is that it goes to war with other nation states. You have imperial, inter imperial wars, but the modern nation state wages war in particular ways. And one of the ways is that it requires the mass production of soldiers. You need big armies not just as you put it, “finding soldiers” but actually manufacturing or mass producing soldiers in large numbers to wage war against one another. And music is not the only piece of this. That’s not an argument that the music makes war. [00:12:00] Music is war. It’s that music is part of this process, an essential part of this process. It’s part of how the military transforms civilians into warriors, ordinary people who would not ordinarily kill other humans. And you transform them into people who (A) are capable of killing other people and in fact do that and following orders in very strict, regimented ways. And so music is part of that discipline. We will probably come back to talking about the phenomenon of military cadences. The chanting and bootcamp. But this sort of sounds off one, two. The guy who makes that a kind of systematic part of boot camp of basic training was a military officer named Bernard Lentz. And he wrote this, he wrote, basically he wrote the manual on how to train drill instructors. And he did this in the 1920s, and the manual comes out in many additions. [00:13:00] And in that, he explains that by instituting this kind of call and response exchange between soldiers and drill sergeants or drill instructors, that the soldiers would be participating in this kind of rhythmic activity. And by chanting in the call and response exchange, they, as he puts it, would be disciplining themselves. And it’s like the most Foucaultian phrase. He says, “Every man becomes his own drill master.” And I’ve never seen any record that Foucault had any awareness of this, but it’s a very Foucaultian conceit. Mack Hagood: And because it’s that idea that somehow the body mind of the subject, of the individual internalizes the discipline that the state wants them to enact and embody. David Suisman: That’s right. That’s right. It’s that internalization of the discipline in a physical and also a kind of mental or psychological way, [00:14:00] but where it deviates from a strict Foucault model is that music also does something else. And that is that it’s a really invaluable tool for soldiers to preserve their own kind of psychic autonomy. In the military, which is what’s sometimes called a total institution, meaning people within it control almost nothing about their lives. You think about hospitals being something similar. You don’t control what you eat, in the military, you don’t control when you sleep often, you don’t even control when you go to the bathroom. But one of the things that soldiers can do is they can control the music in their lives. They can sing, or when they have opportunities for recreation, for relaxing, they control the music. So they have control over very little, but they do control music. And music affects people very deeply. .Mack Hagood: I would slightly differ to say that is also Foucault, but [00:15:00] in his later period, music as a technology of the self David Suisman: Yes. Mack Hagood: Which you say. David Suisman: Which I do discuss. Yeah. Yeah. So you’re right. It’s a different Foucault Mack Hagood: A different Foucault. Yeah. The friendlier, later Foucault. But that’s really interesting because we have this top down music, that’s instituted by the state. So we have what you call field music, right? That’s the music that sort of instills that disciplinarity into the soldiers. David Suisman: The field music is yeah it’s the drum beats, it’s the bugle calls. It’s telling soldiers what to be doing when and where they’re supposed to be, what they’re supposed to be doing at different times. So that’s the field music of say the Civil War. Drummers and buglers are the field music. They’re not the bands. The bands are different. Mack Hagood: And then the bands are also top down, but they’re, those are for entertainment purposes, recruitment purposes, that sort of thing, right? David Suisman: Yeah, the bands do so much work. Here I’m just talking about the Civil War, but it extends beyond the Civil War. But they [00:16:00] are doing recruitment work. They’re great for military civilian relations. And then within the military, military regiments in the Civil War went to the front with dedicated military bands accompanying them. And they would have concerts basically every night. And the purpose of this was to keep soldiers’ morale up. Soldiers engage, and this is true for any war, soldiers engage in combat. The amount of time they spend in combat is very small. Most of the time they’re spending, most of the time they’re doing really boring things. Things that are devastatingly boring and often, suffering from incredible amounts of homesickness. And so this music, these concerts every night were a way of keeping soldiers more or less entertained enough so that they could keep soldiering from one day to the next. They would also sing on the march, which is serving the military’s needs, but also serving the soldiers’ emotional needs. So it works both ways. Mack Hagood: Yeah. And that piece of the [00:17:00] top down and the bottom up, I really think come together during the chapter on World War II, where you write about private Willie Lee Duckworth, who was marching to these cadences that Lentz prescribed but he injected something new into them. Can you talk about him, who he was and then how he changed what we conceive of as a military march in the United States? David Suisman: Yeah, and I’ll start by saying that, most people have some familiarity, even if you’ve never served in the military, people have a sense of soldiers chanting these cadences in basic training. And the practice that we often associate that with is not only the one, two sound off, three, four, et cetera, but this kind of improvisation is often humorous. Sometimes it’s a very macabre humor. Sometimes it’s very sexist humor. But this kind of improvisational call and response, chanting. [00:18:00] What’s interesting is that is not a timeless practice in the military. That dates back to this guy that you mentioned private Willie Lee Duckworth in I think it’s 1944, late in World War II II when he is in training at this, camp where the guy who wrote the book on how to train soldiers, Bernard Lentz, he’s the commanding officer of the camp, and he hears Willie Lee Duckworth allegedly improvising this kind of call and response chanting. And he sees how much it elevates the morale and the sort of energy level of the trainees Mack Hagood: And we’ll play a little clip of that for folks, to hear what that sounds like. But you’ll recognize it. This is what we think of now as soldiers marching. David Suisman: Yeah [00:19:00] Bernard Lens, he’s the commanding officer of the camp. David Suisman: He hears Willie Lee Duckworth and he says, this is amazing. And he says, why don’t you write a bunch of these down? And he assigns him some other officers to do this with him. And then, he institutionalized this and he systematizes it and he makes a recording of it. And then that recording is circulated among other training camps. And very quickly it becomes institutionalized practice within the military to have this kind of improvisational culture that comes originally out of African American prison [00:20:00] songs. And so it’s moving from one disciplinary institutional setting to another, Mack Hagood: I think this is really important to point out because I had no idea about this, Private Duckworth was black and so he was at what? He was in a… David Suisman: Segregated unit. Mack Hagood: Segregated unit. And so Lentz hears this segregated unit doing this kind of vocal performance, right? And then so that’s, when you really think about it, just from the sound of it, from what we know about, work songs and prison songs in the history of African American music, like it’s very recognizably an African American innovation. And yet I never really piece those two things together. David Suisman: Yeah, this is the hidden history of this practice that most people are aware of on some level. The songs when they were in prison were called Jodi Songs, and this was allegedly, folklorists believe because there was a [00:21:00] recurring character in these songs named Joe Joe the Grinder. He was called in prison songs. And Joe the Grinder was this opportunist who would go, and while somebody was in prison Joe the grinder would go and. Steal this guy’s girl, steal this guy’s money, steal this guy’s clothes, whatever. And so Joe the grinder, becomes Jodi. And in the military, these are known as Jodi calls because the character of Jodi gets brought into this military practice. These chants they’re known as Jodi’s, a recurring character in the lyrics. And many, most soldiers know these as Jodi calls, as well as calling them cadences. Mack Hagood: Yeah, one thing that really struck me too was that Lentz seems to have given Duckworth full credit for this. In the record that I saw Duckworth’s picture is there and everything. David Suisman: Yeah, there are some reasons to think that this story might be a little [00:22:00] apocryphal. There are some people who question its complete veracity. I think certainly was involved, but there’s some question that an African American private who was improvising doing this sort of vocal improvisation during training exercises might have very possibly been a form of insubordination. And subject to extreme punishment, so that he would’ve been doing this without some kind of sanction is maybe open to question. So I’m not sure that the Duckworth story is, let’s say the whole story, but it is certainly the story that is enshrined in like national military lore. Mack Hagood: Nevertheless, just, even if this is a constructed narrative of some sort, the fact that a black man was the face of this innovation, that it wasn’t just appropriated and the race of the person who created it, or the people who created it was just suppressed. You hear people in the military saying that, like in [00:23:00] terms of, equity, that sort of thing, that the military has been a trailblazer and I guess this would lend some credence to that. David Suisman: Okay, sure. You say it’s, you could also say it’s, an extreme form of exploitation and appropriation. Mack Hagood: Maybe I’m being too generous. David Suisman: There are a number of ways of reading it. Let’s say that, Mack Hagood: Okay. One thing that I wanted to just put on people’s radar is that you start this history with the Civil War, so I’m just curious to know why not earlier? Why do you begin the book with the Civil War? David Suisman: A couple of reasons. One of them is the first, it’s the first sort of modern war, first modern war of a modern nation state. it uses all the power of the nation state to wage war. It becomes the, it’s sometimes called the first total war. And it involves not just armies going to battle against each one another, but mobilizing entire societies against each other. And in the course of that music is integrated in [00:24:00] new ways that become permanent in the military. So there was music in earlier wars in the Mexican American war and the Revolutionary War, and going back to time immemorial as long as we’ve had war, we’ve had music in war. But it becomes institutionalized in this formal way. And it does so in part because it is integrated with the modern American music industries, the ability to produce all of the brass instruments. That was required for all the military bands in the Civil War. That ability depended on having an industrial infrastructure, particularly in the north, in the Union for the Union Army to scale up production of valved brass instruments. In the very short time during the war, the The Confederate army also had bands but their bans were fewer and smaller and dependent on imported instruments by and [00:25:00] large. Mack Hagood: So the Civil War is the beginning of this sort of systemization of war and the industrialization of war, and it’s interesting to think about musical instruments being part of that because, as I was reading the book, I was thinking about this huge military expenditure and wondering, we know that many things we take for granted today, were invented through the huge military expenditures of the Pentagon. So things like radar or duct tape or nuclear power, or the internet, right? It all comes from the military. So what did the military invent in terms of music and musical instruments and musical technology? David Suisman: Interesting. I don’t think it’s been influential in the same way as inventing the internet. But one thing is it has been responsible for this civilian military fusion. The interconnectedness of the culture industry [00:26:00] and the military has been one of the innovations of having music in the military. It hasn’t just been self-contained. It has grown in the military through its association and cultivation by the culture industry. It has produced a lot of musicians, a lot of musicians have served in the military and gone on to illustrate careers and so it’s a sort of training ground in that sense. It reverberates that way. But I think maybe the most concrete way is to think about the way that. Music is involved in the militarization of American culture, really beginning around the turn of the 20th century. And here we get back to Sooza and the popularity of brass bands and wind bands that spills over. It’s a military phenomenon essentially, but that becomes American popular culture. We have it even down to today. Every football game that has a marching [00:27:00] band at halftime is evidence of this long term reverberation of the militarization of American popular culture. The degree to which people are familiar with Soozan marches even today, Stars and Stripes Forever. Even today, this is part of the air that we breathe in American popular culture. In a lot of ways, Mack Hagood: Do you think it was an indirect influence on jazz too? I’m thinking about, if I remember correctly, Louis Armstrong, learned to play the horn at the Colored Waifs Home. Which had a sort of military esque band that was part of, cultivating and disciplining the young students there. David Suisman: Yeah, I think you could totally make that argument that the availability of brass instruments is part of this explosion of brass band music that is interconnected with the Civil War. You don’t have jazz, you don’t have early jazz especially without that instrumentation. And the standardization that goes [00:28:00] along with musical training that’s associated with brass bands. So I think there, there’s definitely that. Jazz comes into World War I in the segregated bands of the US Army, particularly James Reese Europe’s Band, which basically brings jazz to Europe for the first time. So there are certainly those interconnections as well. I would accept that. Mack Hagood: I was really blown away when you were talking about the Union Army hiring all of these German immigrant instrument makers who are making these cutting edge brass instruments, and you have a list of forgotten brass instruments that was really making me laugh. I’m gonna see if I can get to the page. I think it’s page 26. Let me see if I can even read the names of these things, because they’re very peculiar sounding. David Suisman: Yeah. We have a sense that we know what musical instruments encompass today, but there are so many that were popular then that have been forgotten. They exist in museums now. But [00:29:00] not much else. Mack Hagood: Yeah, so alt horns, bass tubas,. bombardons, burdens, clavichord, cornophones, saxtubas’, and sudrophone. I love to see these instruments. Do we have any around? I wonder if we have extra David Suisman: They are, they’re in museums and we have pictures of them. They look like variations on instruments that we’re familiar with tubas and trombones and that sort of thing. They don’t stand out. They don’t look like Dr. Seuss type, Mack Hagood: Yeah. I was letting my imagination run wild there David Suisman: Yeah. Mack Hagood: The Civil War really sets the stage for the military use of music in modernity in a lot of different ways. But some of the practices would seem very strange to us. And one of them is the use of drummer boys. Can you talk about the drummer boy and who he was? Maybe how many of them there were because he really became an [00:30:00] icon of the Civil War there. David Suisman: Yeah, one of the things that fascinates me about this whole project is some stuff seems really familiar and some stuff seems really foreign. And the proliferation of drummer boys in the Civil War was one of the things that seemed really foreign. There were thousands of them, and most of them, not all of them, were in fact young boys. They were often too young to enlist in the army. There the most famous one was this guy Robert Henry Hendershot, who enlisted in the Union Army at the age of 11. He claimed to be the youngest person in the union Army, but in fact, other researchers believed that there were now drummers who were younger than him. Maybe nine and ten years old. They served with military units and they were the communication system for officers telling soldiers what to do, when to do it, and where to do it. So they would say, assemble, or they would say March or they’d say, go left, or go right or start shooting or stop shooting. And drummers and [00:31:00] buglers were audible. The reason why they did this is because they were audible over distances, and they were audible over the cacophony of combat. You could hear them. And they would be at the elbow of commanding officers. The commanding officer would say, “Do the drumbeat for march” Not only is the phenomenon of the drummer boy interesting. And these, I should say, became these figures in popular culture. There were songs about them, there were plays about them, there were novels about them. So they were well known at the time, and they were endeared in this kind of nostalgic way. But the other thing that’s fascinating about them is that these drum beats that the drummer boys beat out were recognizable to all the soldiers. Part of soldiering required that they could recognize all these different drum beats, dozens of them in some cases that they would say, oh, that’s the drum beat for assemble. That’s the drumbeat for, eat, go to sleep, whatever. Mack Hagood: Yeah that’s fascinating. It’s reminiscent of what Jonathan Stern would call an audile technique, [00:32:00] right? Like a, a mode of listening that we get in modernity that gets very specific and detailed in a particular way. And just to think about these young boys being utilized as a communication technology is pretty fascinating. And I think part of the setting that we need to set for people and thinking about the drummer boys’ importance is that you point out this is the first war where the amount of gun smoke generated is truly like blinding. Like you you really quite often can’t see, right? There’s, and there’s also this volume of bombardment that was unprecedented at the time as well, David Suisman: Yeah, to be fair, it’s the first American time. The Napoleonic Wars I think had a lot of this smoke as well. So the 19th century phenomenon of lots of smoke sounds being essential to communication. You couldn’t rely on visual cues. You couldn’t rely on SEMA fours or whatever, for visual cues, and that’s why the sound became so [00:33:00] important. As much as we can bore into the Civil War I don’t want listeners to get the sense that this is a Civil War book, because it’s really just the point for that. Mack Hagood: no, not at all. Not at all. Not at all. And in fact, I was about to jump forward and just touch on some of the other wars that you discuss. And the book. It’s not entirely centered on specific wars. It is taking a wider view, but for the purposes of this podcast, it’s an easy way to organize our discussion. And I was really interested that by World War I, I this sort of systemization and industrialization of war have really intensified and we start to get sort of psychological conceptions of war. And so like a, a term that comes to the forefront that you mentioned earlier, was the concept of Morale you, you talk about morale as a, as an idea and how [00:34:00] music was useful to the military as they were trying to cultivate morale. David Suisman: Morale is crucial to military planning, military management in World War I. There it rises, it doesn’t, there’s morale, people talk about morale earlier, but it becomes a really key concept in military management around World War I and morale. Funny because it encompasses different things. It encompasses mental health, general attitudes, general like levels of happiness attitudes about the war. It doesn’t mean one specific thing, but, music Works for elevating all of them. Whatever you mean by morale, music helps it and it helps people’s mental health. It improves their disposition about where they are and what they’re doing. It doesn’t make them love the war necessarily if they don’t want to be soldiers. But it has this kind of multi versatile, multi-function effect. And in the First World War, military managers, military, senior officials looked on [00:35:00] music as an essential sort of marshal technology There’s a general in World War I named Leonard Wood, hardcore guy. He’d been a rough rider during the Spanish American war. He was a hero of the Indian wars. And he says, he’s talking about singing here specifically. But singing was a big part of music in World War I. He says it sounds odd to the ordinary person when you tell him every soldier should be a singer because the layman cannot reconcile singing with killing. But it is just as essential that the soldiers should know how to sing as that they should carry rifles and learn how to shoot them. So this is part of the idea of what an operational military includes, encompasses how it works, it has that kind of function and so morale is a big part of that. Mack Hagood: I was really struck by the role of group singing in World War I. There you show these photographs of men singing together. Where did this phenomenon come from? David Suisman: It is such a singing [00:36:00] war. There has always been singing in war, but there were, I think probably if you had to say one war where there was the most singing, it probably would’ve been World War I and because, and it was because it was integrated in, there were these events called Mass Sings. These were daily or weekly singing sessions at training camps throughout the United States preparing American soldiers for war. And they were led by these volunteer song leaders who would come and they would. Lead Marines sailors, army soldiers, whatever, in song, in large numbers. It grows out of both the sense of what singing can do in the military, in a sense part of military history. And it grew out of the contemporary movement called the Community Singing Movement which involved a lot of large community singing as a recreational and morally uplifting activity. The 19 tens, it was in the early first couple of decades of the 20th [00:37:00] century. There was a lot of community singing, and so this is also an outgrowth of that. And yes, these pictures are really arresting. Thousands and thousands of soldiers joining together in song. Often in the pictures you can see soldiers holding song sheets or songbooks. US soldiers were issued song books as part of their essential equipment in World War I. This floored me to learn that, they got the rifle, they got the knapsack, they got the songbook. Mack Hagood: That’s amazing. And the YMCA part of this was the early days of the YMCA. Do you remember? David Suisman: The YMCA was crucial in World War I. I. In later awards, it plays an important role too, but it’s part of this military civilian institution interchange this sort of mutually constitutive aspect of war depending on these civilian institutions. And it was the provider for the military of facilities where soldiers could go for relaxation, for recreation. And so when [00:38:00] soldiers were not soldiering, when they were not in combat, when they were not, going through drills and they had downtime, they didn’t have yet, they didn’t have enlisted men’s clubs the way we’d have in later wars. They would go to these YMCA facilities called huts and the huts would have equipment for soldiers to write letters home. There were to be books and invariably there was musical equipment, there were pianos, and there were phonographs. And so the YMCA was the official designated supplier of recreation facilities for the military. And it included music in all of those facilities, Mack Hagood: That’s fascinating. Now, it would be a glaring omission, I think, if I talked with you about the Civil War and World War I and music and not bring up, minstrel shows and just the sort of racialized dynamics of music in this era of popular music in [00:39:00] America. Could you maybe talk a little bit about race and music at that time? David Suisman: In the Civil War, World War I era. Mack Hagood: Yeah. David Suisman: Yes, it’s complicated. There are a lot of different ways of coming at this. One of them is thinking about the roles of the African American troops. The other is thinking about blackface, minstrelsy and the imprint that had on the white troops. The songs that soldiers sang in the Civil War, for example, were a mix of kind of parlor ballads and sentimental songs, and songs that came out of the blackface minstrel tradition. There are photographs. I have a couple in the book of soldiers involved in recreation in World War I I who put on blackface minstrel shows. Mack Hagood: And if I remember correctly, some of the supplies that soldiers were given were, like burnt cork and things like this to, David Suisman: were, this was, yeah, it was part of the apparatus, if you will, of music in the military was supplying equipment to put on [00:40:00] shows which were often mil blackface, minstrel shows. Yeah. Mack Hagood: and then for the African American soldiers. What was their musical experience like and was there crossover between these two groups? David Suisman: The US military was segregated until 1948. And so, if you’re talking about the Civil War, you’re talking about World War I, even World War II, they tended to have something, they had their own bands. They had their own musical cultures, their own musical traditions by and large. Their music involved the music of the Army as a whole, but it also involved its own uniqueness. Contributions as well. So the soldiers, the colored troops of the Union Army in the Civil War, had their own. A lot of them came. A lot of them were formerly enslaved. People who brought their musical traditions, African American civilian musical traditions into the military they adapted [00:41:00] spirituals into, military songs as military songs in the Civil War in World War I, I I already mentioned James Reese Europe. He was the leading band leader in the Ragtime New York musical world. And he becomes the leading. Band leader in the Army, and it was pretty much widely agreed upon. The African American bands in World War I were the best bands. The other bands there were not the only bands. There were a lot of bands that were not these African American bands, but they’re the ones that people talked about, and they’re the ones that most people know about today. But I, one of the things I try to show in the book is that there was a bigger culture of which they were only one part. Mack Hagood: And so they were the ones who brought a jazz sensibility to Europe. David Suisman: Exactly. Exactly. So jumping forward to World War II, you talk about a shift that has been discussed In popular music studies, ethnomusicology, musicology, which is that people. Become [00:42:00] music consumers in the sort of, somewhere between the invention of the phonograph, And by the time of World War II, standing together with a bunch of guys and singing isn’t the predominant form of musicking anymore, right? Like where people are used to consuming music. So how did the military respond in World War II, to this new type of music listener that was their military service personnel? Singing doesn’t disappear. One of the things I just wanna sort of stress is that there is this trend that you’re talking about where there’s an increased amount of music consumption but singing persists up through Vietnam. David Suisman: In Vietnam, one of the CBS news reporters who asks Marines during the Tet Offensive of 1968, “How do you enter, how do you keep your spirits up at night? And the Marine says, we play cards and sing” And this is 1968. So [00:43:00] singing doesn’t disappear and there is both formal and informal singing in the military. But in answer to your question the military records it, it is a whole series of records just for soldiers called V discs. And these were a mix of some military music, but a lot of popular music, many by very well known music, jazz musicians and swing musicians of the era. Some other kinds of music, some light classical too. The military produce these records, ship them out to military units all over the world on a regular basis, and the soldiers would then play them on phonographs that the military had issued to these individual units. So this is part of keeping, keeping up with the transformation of musical practice. In civilian life throughout the 20th century there were phonographs, there was phonograph use in World War I as well, but it became much [00:44:00] more, much broader, much more expanded and much more systematized in World War II. The military also created a worldwide radio network for the first time, the Armed Forces Radio Network. And so soldiers in World War II listened, sat around listening to the radio and they listened to radio shows that were modeled on the music shows of the American Homefront. And so the goal of the military by World War II II was to try to create conditions that were as close to soldiers’ lives as consumers as possible. They try to give them all the consumer comforts at least in this case, through music the oh, but just an example of how, and sometimes the line is blurred between them. So another thing that, another initiative during World War II was that the military issued these monthly circulars that were sent to soldiers called the Army Hit Kit. Every month they would get in the mail through the postal service, the military postal service, [00:45:00] an eight page circular with the song lyrics of the, of current and recent popular songs. And sometimes those songs were the same songs that were included with the latest batch of records. And sometimes it was also expected that they would have the lyrics so they could sing them even without the records. So there was an expectation that there would still be singing even though there was also a lot of musical listening at the time. Mack Hagood: Wow. Wow. And then of course we also get the in-person entertainment from the USO. Can you maybe talk about the USO as that? ’cause this was a massive initiative. First of all, we have to remember there were 16 million. People in the combat theater like that’s just an incredible number of people that you need to entertain. And the idea that they try to entertain them, not only through media, but also in person, is just just a staggering [00:46:00] effort to, to think about. David Suisman: Yeah it grows out of an effort. Again, growing out of World War I, there was an effort to work with the vaudeville industry in the major impresarios in World War I to supply live entertainment vaudeville shows for soldiers in World War I and in World War I, it works but by the time you get to World War ii, ii, they’re ready. a number of organizations come together and they form what’s called the United Service Organizations to supply places where soldiers could come together and dance for forms of informal recreation. And so on. And then they would also have these live shows and they, this was a, basically a subsidiary of the USO, it’s called the Camp Shows Inc. And this was the part of the USO that staged shows by the most famous stars for the GIS stationed all over, but also not just the most famous. Stars because as you were mentioning, there were 16 million men and women who served in the military in World War II, [00:47:00] and that required a lot of shows. And so there was the A list, there were the top stars, the big the big stars, and then there was the B list, and then there was the C list. And they would just send out as many entertainers as they could recruit to work for the military, to entertain troops to keep their spirits up. And sometimes they were great and sometimes they were not so great, but generally the soldiers would go along with it because they were in effect captive audiences. They didn’t have any other options for live entertainment. Even a kind of mediocre live show, was better than no live show if you’re sitting in a foxhole somewhere. Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. One, one thing that I found just, I don’t know, it was a little bit difficult to come to terms with, was thinking about the USO. These sorts of clubs and canteens where you mentioned they would have dances and that there were these hostesses who were expected [00:48:00] to dance with all these servicemen. Can you talk about that role and the emotional labor that must have been involved? David Suisman: I can, and, but I can’t do so without calling attention to the great work of Sherry Tucker on this. Her book, dance Floor Democracy is a really brilliant, Exploration of this. And she talks about the canteens as these places where there was a really, a great deal of emotional labor going on. There were supposed to be these really democratic spaces where. High ranking soldiers were dancing next to the lowest privates and so on, In, and they were supposed to be racially integrated. In fact, they weren’t necessarily racially integrated. And their real story is more complicated than the legend, or the lore that grows up around these canteens. But the thinking was they were opportunities for these servicemen, or people who were about to get shipped out to dance with young women who were happy to [00:49:00] do so under very strictly supervised conditions. There was not supposed to be that, it was supposed to be just dancing. And they, the women who worked as hostesses generally felt like they were performing a really valuable kind of patriotic service. They were helping to give this young man what could be. In truth, his last dance, and he is gonna give his life for the country. The least that somebody could do would be to dance for them on the dance floor. So this is the logic underpinning the canteens. And it was this era, it was the swing era when there was this idea that swing was this kind of democratic force in American popular life. Mack Hagood: Wow. It’s just, yeah, it’s really something to think about moving forward to the Vietnam War and to the US incursions into Iraq and in Afghanistan in the War on Terror. The Vietnam War has a certain kind of [00:50:00] mythology around it, as you say. What did you want to do? Sort of do with your chapter on Vietnam. What did you want to add to the musical story? What did you maybe wanna subtract from the musical story? David Suisman: I wanted to overturn the musical story. I almost called the chapter on Vietnam. Almost everything you know about music in the Vietnam War is wrong. Mack Hagood: Yeah. So break it down for us. What do we have wrong about that Mack Hagood: David did indeed break down the musical mythology of Vietnam for us. We also talked about headphone use as a form of self care in the War on Terror, David Suisman’s methods as a historian and a writer, his reading and listening recommendations. So much stuff. It’s like a whole Extra half hour of content. But if you’re hearing this, it means you’re either on the public feed of the podcast or you’re watching on YouTube. And my request to you is this, please join us on the Patreon. It’s three [00:51:00] bucks a month. I fund this podcast out of pocket. I lose money on every episode I make. It would be really great if I could just break even. But more importantly than that, I just get such a great feeling when someone joins the Patreon, because it shows me that this show is valuable enough to them that they want to support it. And I actually just did the numbers and it looks like we’ve got about between one and 2 percent of people who are going to listen to this episode who are actually subscribed to the Patreon. If I could get that number up to 5%, I could outsource some of the technical heavy lifting. Thing that makes this show so time consuming for me. And I could possibly even do two episodes a month. So if you want to support, go to patreon.com/phantom power. And if the financial thing is not for you, you can also just join up as a free Patreon member, be part of the community. I love that as well. Another thing you can do is just tell a friend about the [00:52:00] show. It’s been a while since I asked folks to do that, but it really would help us grow a lot. Our next show is a round table about the cassette tape with three amazing scholars of that technology and the communities that have evolved out of that technology. We’ve got Rob Drew, Eleanor Patterson, and Andrew Simon. It’s going to be fantastic. So look for that next month. And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks. To David Suisman for being on the show, and I want to thank my assistants Nisso Sacha and Katelyn Phan for their editing assistance and transcription work. And I want to thank Blue the Fifth for our outro music. See you next time. [00:53:00] The post How Music Became an Instrument of War (David Suisman) appeared first on Phantom Power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Liz Pelly is our foremost journalist/critic on the Spotify beat. Her byline has appeared at the Baffler, Guardian, NPR, and many other outlets. She is also an adjunct instructor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Liz is also been making the media rounds lately, talking about her new book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (One Signal Publishers). The book is both a history of Spotify and an argument that Spotify is not, in fact, a music company, but rather an advertising company focused on manipulating user behavior to maximize time on platform. As a consequence, Spotify not only pushes musical aesthetics towards banal, “lean-back listening,” it also makes musicians themselves expendable: replaceable by ghost musicians, AI slop, and behavioral algorithms that keep people just barely engaged at the lowest cost. In this show, Liz details how platforms shape listening and music making alike. We also discuss the tension between frictionless music consumption and meaningful cultural engagement. And remember, there’s an extended version of this interview which features a bunch of bonus material including a listener question, a deep dive into Liz’s reporting methods, and the backstory of how she got into journalism and got a major book deal, plus her book and music recommendations. It’s available to our Patrons for a mere $3 a month. Sign up at Patreon.com/phantompower. Transcript Liz Pelly: [00:00:00] When I hear something like the founder of an AI company saying “Making music is too hard. People don’t want to learn how to play instruments,” or even this idea that a streaming platform should help people reduce cognitive work. It’s like, that essentially means we should help people not have to think. And I think that, you know, Mack Hagood: Yeah. Liz Pelly: As critics, what we do is encourage people to think, you know, thinking and making decisions is an important part of processing life in the world and information and culture and figuring out how you actually feel about someone’s art. Introduction: This is Phantom Power. Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom [00:01:00] Power, a podcast about sound. I’m Mack Hagood. My guest today is journalist Liz Pelly, someone I’ve been reading avidly and having my students read for almost a decade now. Pelly is our foremost journalist and critic on the Spotify beat. Her byline has appeared in the Baffler, the Guardian, NPR, and many other outlets. She’s also an adjunct instructor at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts. Liz has been making the media rounds lately, talking about her new book Mood Machine, the Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, out on One Signal Publishers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The book is both a history of Spotify and an argument that Spotify is not in fact a music company, but rather an advertising company focused on manipulating user behavior to maximize time on platform. As a consequence, Spotify not only pushes musical aesthetics towards banal, lean back [00:02:00] listening, it also makes musicians themselves expendable, replaceable by ghost musicians, AI slop, and behavioral algorithms that keep people just barely engaged at the lowest cost. I am super excited to have Liz on the show and get into the weeds of how platforms shape listening and music making alike. And remember, there’s an extended version of this interview that features a bunch of bonus material, including a listener question, a deep dive into Liz’s reporting methods, and the backstory of how she got into journalism and got a major book deal. We’ll also have her book and music recommendations. It’s available to our patrons for a mere $3 a month. Sign up at patreon. com /phantom power. All right, let’s get to it. All right. Liz, welcome. Liz Pelly: Hey, thank you so much for having me. Mack Hagood: So I [00:03:00] thought we could start off by talking about the title of your book. For those of you folks out there who aren’t familiar with your years of research on Spotify and your journalistic pieces on it, why name a book about Spotify, Mood Machine? Liz Pelly: That’s a great question. I think when I first started thinking about the book, I was thinking about it in two sections. Actually, the first book proposal that I wrote was a proposal for two books. One was going to be about the impact of the streaming economy on listening. And one was going to be about the impact on artists. I quickly realized that it made much more sense to just write one book, but I shifted to this idea of writing a book in two parts where the first part was going to be about how streaming had reshaped listening and the second part was going to be about the material impact on musicians. That structure didn’t quite hold, by the time I got to the final table of contents, things shifted a little bit, but [00:04:00] when I was thinking about, originally, when I was thinking about mood, to me, that word sort of evoked the way that streaming has impacted listening and the shift from albums to playlists, the championing of playlists that are mood playlists or connected to emotions in some way. And then, when I thought about the word machine, I really thought about the relationship between, like labor and the music industry or labor and capital even. You know, I was thinking about the way in which the music industry squeezes musicians more and more under this model and, just the trajectory of the music business. Obviously, a lot of this book also covers the shift from the playlist era into the era of streaming curation, being more driven by machine learning and algorithms and personalization. So there’s surely like a point of this all, or there’s a way of interpreting the title that also evokes that, but yeah, it’s really interesting. Like, you know, when I thought of it, I was thinking a lot about the relationship between musicians and this model. Mack Hagood: Yeah. Well, I love the title and I definitely want to dig into a lot of what you just mentioned there, but I was thinking maybe we could go back to 2007. Is that when Spotify launched? Liz Pelly: Technically, the company was created in 2006 and it launched in its first markets in 2008. Mack Hagood: Okay. So back then, what was the state of the music industry? What was Spotify, the alleged solution to? What was the problem? Liz Pelly: So this is still the era where the music industry was trying to figure out how to recover from the impact of file sharing. Around 1999 to 2001 was the time when Napster was, , according to the people in the music business, wreaking havoc on the global recorded music industry. By the time Spotify came along, the music business had already spent years and years trying to figure out solutions that would work in the digital music era, you know, also taking individual fans to court over file sharing. The music business had tried to launch some of its own streaming services as an alternative to piracy. There’s a whole sort of, fumbled strategy, on the behalf of the major record labels and the mainstream music business trying to figure out how to solve this problem. It’s really interesting because the impacts of file sharing, I think , were and continue to be felt differently by different musicians and different corners of music. But something else that was also going on was in the United States by the mid 2000s, the iTunes library model had taken off or taken hold a little bit more here than in other parts of [00:07:00] the world. Spotify was founded in Stockholm, Sweden by two men with backgrounds in the advertising industry, in Sweden, even by 2005, 2006, while the industry was somewhat successfully starting to figure out ways of selling digital music to consumers, piracy was stronger there. Around that time, you still had the Pirate Bay, which is a really big cultural force in Sweden. Sweden had a pirate party. There’s a politicized element of music piracy in Sweden. And yeah, I think the founders of Spotify, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon just saw an opportunity to build on their backgrounds and add tech to try to build a product that would appeal to both consumers that loved music piracy and the music industry that was like, you know, floundering. Mack Hagood: You know, it’s really fascinating to think about the Sweden piece, why it pops up there specifically, there were so many American companies that [00:08:00] were trying to take a crack at this, I mean, back in the day, if you had forced me to guess, like this concept of just like streaming music, , who would, , be able to do it. Well, I probably would have guessed something like MySpace because there were, that’s where all the indie bands were. And it just seemed like something like band camp could have happened there. But Sweden winds up being the hotbed of it. And as you say, something to do with piracy, the role piracy plays there. And it seemed from what I gleaned from your book that partly the music labels were willing to let Sweden experiment, because they already saw it as a lost cause in terms of everyone was just pirating music. Is that right? Liz Pelly: Yeah, according to people who were in Sweden at the time, the music industry had started to see Sweden as a lost market, to use the quote, the phrase that came up in some of my interviews. , specifically the [00:09:00] free tier, you know, that was a period of time when the music business, , and the major labels who, , control the rights to so much of what we think of when we think of the history of recorded music, which is its own issue to unpack the major labels were really allergic to anything that had the word free in it that involved, the concept of giving music away for free or providing free access to music. In Sweden, though, which the music business saw as a sort of lost market, they were more willing to take a chance on something with a free tier. Of course, the original Spotify model, like the original model that Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon came up with, was a product that would, It was exclusively a way of delivering content for free, supported by ads. So that was the original business model. And originally they weren’t even sure if it would just be music. The original idea was some sort of media delivery platform that would provide access to a library of content for free, funded by [00:10:00] advertising. And Even if the, , the music business was more likely to, or more willing to allow for experimenting with this sort of free tier in Sweden. Mack Hagood: Yeah. And I was really struck in your book by what you said a minute ago, which is that these guys weren’t interested in music per se. They were interested in some kind of streaming media content to run ads against. And so, they were an ad selling business, not a music selling business from the get go. Liz Pelly: That was their background. Daniel Ek’s background was that he worked at an SEO firm after he graduated from high school. You know, in high school, he had applied for a job at Google and they said, try again when you have a college degree. So he built his own open source search engine. And then he got a job at an SEO firm. And then by the time he was 22, he was the CTO of this cartoon doll gaming website for teen girls. And then it was Martin Lorentzon [00:11:00] background was in ad tech. In selling automated advertisements. Mack Hagood: I mean, I think this is really interesting because I think on the one hand, because They weren’t music people. They didn’t have certain attachments to music that probably allowed them to innovate in the way that they did. Right. But on the other hand, a business model that is downstream from running ads rather than downstream from how we work with music as music, You can imagine, a lot of cultural and technological effects of that. Liz Pelly: Totally. One of the things I write in the introduction is, you know, there’s so many different ways to understand them. The story of Spotify, the story of the streaming era. But one of them, I think, is the story of these advertising men bringing the logic of their industry to music in new ways. And I feel like that comes up time and again. I mean, in some ways I think it could be [00:12:00] boiled down to purely just the reality that now what we have is a model that views music so much as just , a cheap content source that fuels, , this, a broader, , advertising or subscription model. and I think one of the things that I tried to trace in the book, there’s multiple different threads running through the book, but one is sort of investigating, Different efforts on the part of Spotify to lower the cost of content, , or to, , lower the amount of money that they have to spend on the audio that circulates on their platform and allows them to sell ads and sell subscriptions. Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. One interesting sort of leap that I think the company took is you talk about how, in 2012, the company had, , I think 5 million paid subscribers. And in 2017, , they had more than 60 million [00:13:00] and they were , basically in 2012, this company that had a lot of major investors, but wasn’t making any money. And, , I’m really interested in how you treat sort of that five year span, , and think about what shifts happened in the company and then what the cultural effects of those shifts have been. And I’m. Particularly interested in this because, , you were asking me online or offline what my research was about. And I do this research into how people use sound to control their effect on things like noise canceling headphones, white noise machines, nature, sound apps. And what I was noticing around 2013 or 2014, was that it seemed to me that the streaming platforms were starting to treat music. In a very similar way, and that I was noticing that instead of organizing around genre, like they were in the music, in the record stores that I grew up going to, [00:14:00] they were really, pitching music playlists in terms of like the mood or the function that it has. So this is music to work out by, this is music to do this, to have a dinner party with or whatever. Right. And I remember mentioning this to my friends, like in popular music studies. And I was like, and saying, this is the, they’re changing the way music is purchased basically and organized and they’re like, ah, that seems like a bit of a stretch to me. They’re like, you know, genre and cultural capital and taste making is still like the coin of the realm in popular music. , you got to remember all the editorial playlists, like rap caviar and pitchforks playlist. And they were kind of like talking me down from this. And I was like, Oh, okay. you guys. Maybe you know better than I do. But then when I saw your articles come out in the Baffler, like the first one that came out, I don’t know if that one was called like the problem with Muzak or something, I was so psyched because [00:15:00] you were taking this premise seriously, and examining it really closely. And so I’ve just been a super big fan of your work ever since then. And what I really like to focus on in this interview is, , we know, At least I think we know that Spotify in a lot of ways has been bad for musicians, but I would really like to talk a lot about this user experience and the ways that music’s capacities for affecting mood or shifting attention or managing attention or feelings seems to have gained precedence over music’s capacities as art or as the object of our attention that the, you know, active attention. So going back to 2012, what. Started to happen at Spotify that’s changed, that [00:16:00] gave them the insight to move in this direction. Liz Pelly: So something that I spent a while doing while trying to trace the specific moments of when strategy changed. I mean, I did a lot of interviews for this book. It’s interesting hearing you talk about it. Because I started covering Spotify in 2016. So it was, you know, kind of a little bit after. This moment, and a lot of my initial research was interviewing musicians and interviewing people who’ve worked at independent record labels. And by the time I started writing about streaming and Spotify musicians and people who worked at independent labels, it had become clear to them that these types of mood playlists were having such a more dominant role in how people were presented music. Especially things like chill playlists or workout playlists. Things like functional music. but trying to trace, you know, earlier than the 2016, 2017 era, [00:17:00] I went and interviewed people who were close to the company at the time. And I also spent a lot of time on the internet archive, looking at the front page of Spotify and trying to trace when things changed and when the company’s presentation of its products specifically changed. Mack Hagood: That is, I mean, can I just pause there? Like for, we have a lot of people who do research in this who listened to this podcast. I mean, that is such a great mode of doing research is just going through the internet archive and looking at those different front pages. I love that Liz Pelly: Thank you. And you know, it was super interesting because there was a specific moment. It was around December 2012, where before that moment, the front page of Spotify had been really simple. It was like a white background and green and black and gray text. And it was all about explaining how easy and simple and frictionless it was to subscribe to Spotify, or to access [00:18:00] Spotify for free and get access to a world of music. Like this was sort of the way in which it was pitched. It was instant, simple, and free. You know, this product gives you easy access to all the music you could ever imagine. And then there was this really specific moment where it really shifted and it was less about, looking like kind of a tech company website. And all of a sudden it was this montage of hazy images, like moody, sort of washed over like, you know, someone, driving with a sun flare and there was actually a song that auto played in the background. It was like this really kind of moody generic, like folk song playing in the background. So I would auto play when you went to the website Mack Hagood: Really? Liz Pelly: Yeah, it’s really interesting. And there’s like, you know, sun flares, people driving, people kind of like hanging out with their friends, with their loved ones, like in a hammock together. And it was really all about showing you these distinct moments in your life where you might [00:19:00] be listening to music or might be listening to Spotify. In my book, I described the photos as like stock photos in a picture frame, like waiting to be replaced by real life or something like that. Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like the early Instagram aesthetic. Liz Pelly: Exactly, definitely. Like the early Instagram filter aesthetic, or even like, it sort of looked like images you would see on Tumblr or Pinterest at the time or something like that. So to me, it became clear that something strategically had happened at that moment, where they had decided that, in order to reach more people, They had to think of themselves more as sort of pitching a lifestyle or pitching different ways of users relating to what they were offering. And in one of the interviews that I did, it came up that around this time, Spotify had commissioned a research agency to do a study on its product and its own users, to figure out how people were actually using [00:20:00] Spotify. This was also about , just over a year after they launched in the United States, where there was not only more competition than in, , other markets in terms of, selling the specific idea of how to relate to digital music, because, there were other streaming services in the United States and there also was,, more people used the iTunes store. More people listen to mp3s and buy digital music. So they were kind of competing, also with Pandora, Rhapsody. And according to this person who was close to the company at the time, who told me about this research study that they commissioned, apparently they Found out through this research that a vast majority of their listeners were coming to the platform for more of a lean back experience, , and that they started to think of what they were offering less as, access to this world of music, access to this fully stocked, , iTunes library, but streams through the Internet, maybe similar to the experience , users [00:21:00] had come to expect in the post file sharing era, , there’s this interview that I referenced early on in the book, as a conference appearance by Andres Ehn who is the first, Spotify’s first employee. And he talks about how in the early days, they didn’t see their competition as other music services, but they saw their competition as the pirate Bay and how, you know, it seems like what they, talk about how, what they were trying to offer initially was a product that was better than piracy, not competing with piracy, but better than piracy. So they were really thinking of the experience of the file sharing music listener, as the person they were trying to win over. And it seems like after there was this specific moment where they realized that actually , their new target listener was becoming more of like the Pandora listener or the person who is coming to the service and looking for, you know, a button that they can press and listen to a feed of music organized around, a specific, theme, or who maybe needed [00:22:00] more guidance in terms of what to listen to. So I think it was distinctly related to having to grow in the United States. Even in the press at the time, they talked about how they were embracing this moods and moments strategy as part of needing to grow beyond early adopters and reach a more mainstream audience, which I think is pretty interesting. Mack Hagood: Yeah, and there was definitely something in the air around then because I remember Beats Music, which eventually became Apple Music, had something called The Sentence. I don’t know if you ever came across this, but it was this really bizarre thing where there was like a sent-, a literal sentence, but it had pull down menus and it was like, I’m, Blank and you could pull down like hanging with my homies or like chilling with my pets or whatever. And I want to, you know, feel like, and it ended up like lifted or like, they’re just like all of these [00:23:00] weird, you know, adjectives for the emotional feeling that you wanted to have at that moment. And then you would just fill this sentence with things from the pull down menu and then it would just generate, you know, an on the fly radio station for you at that moment. I don’t really know how that happened, how it worked in the background, but there was, I’m not sure precisely what year that was. That might’ve been, it was probably after what Spotify did, but I’m not, I’m really not a hundred percent sure, there was definitely this kind of strategy in the air. Liz Pelly: Yeah, there’s also Songza, which was another company that existed at the same time. That was doing sort of like concierge type mood playlist Recommendations and they were a company that got mentioned in the press at the time, you know So following this shift, Spotify bought this company Tunigo, which was at first a third party app on its platform for what they called ready made playlists that [00:24:00] were themed to different moods and moments and . They were compared a lot to Songza in the music business press at the time. Now, at the same time that this is happening, it’s not like genre based playlists have gone away. There are the Rap Caviars and the Pitchfork curated playlists and things of that ilk. One thing I was really interested to learn about was that there was almost like a farm league of playlists with the smaller playlists that they would, maybe A B test songs against one another in these smaller playlists and see things like skip rates, that a song could sort of… through these different metrics work its way up from a smaller playlist to a more popular playlist, , and I guess, between the mood based and the human tested curated playlists, I guess you could say, like, “What’s wrong with that?” I [00:25:00] think Daniel Ek would say this is democratic form of programming, right? Like, like we’re letting people’s stated choices and, or, at least the choices that their behavior tells us through examining the data, choose what’s popular. So, what’s wrong with that? I think that narrative around the democratic, meritocratic data driven playlist ladder climb, where they would say that, the music that ends up on these really popular playlists is informed by user data. We’re looking at putting songs on these smaller feeder playlists and testing them and seeing which ones react. And if it reacts, we’ll move it up. In some ways, , I also think that was sort of like a narrative that they sold to the independent music world to convince independent labels and independent artists that this was a democratic system when in reality, there were so many other factors that would influence whether or not [00:26:00] a song ended up on a popular playlist and, to this day, talking to people in the music world, it seems that there’s no better way to get onto a Spotify playlist than to just simply know one of the people who works there. Or to have some sort of direct relationship due to a marketing team relationship, the major labels. Mack Hagood: So there’s still some old school gatekeeping going? Liz Pelly: Absolutely. You know, like the very first article that I wrote about streaming was about the privileged relationship that the major labels had with playlist curators. And at the time I interviewed a major label, , someone who worked in digital marketing for a major label who talked about how it was just a different level of access, how major labels had dedicated reps at these companies and dedicated employees at their labels who would take meetings, send over Excel spreadsheets of priorities, those phone calls. Maybe not like guaranteed placement because of some marketing relationship, but a different level of access. And I think even now, you know, [00:27:00] musicians are told if you want to get onto Spotify playlist, there’s this form that you fill out and you have to pitch your songs two to three weeks in advance and put the proper tags and a description and how you’re trying to target this. It’s like, if you are an artist on a major label especially if you are an in-demand artist on a major label, like you’re not filling out the Google form, you’re not filling out the form on Spotify for artists website. You know, there’s a different type of relationship there. So that is, even to this day, I think it continues to be interesting to remember. Mack Hagood: So in fact, it’s not as democratic or demotic equity lead us to believe. Let’s just say it was, would that solve the problem? would that, make it Liz Pelly: Well, I guess it depends, the context that you’re discussing, I think, because something also that I think in the streaming era, there’s, this idea that [00:28:00] these playlists are helping people listen to more music than they would be listening to otherwise that, you know, maybe you don’t, know what you want to listen to, but putting on like a morning commute playlist could introduce you to 50 new artists that you’d never heard of before. And sometimes you’ll hear people say things like, “I listened to 6,000 new musicians last year. How could you say I’m not discovering new music?” And I think something to remember is the way in which coming to a platform and listening to these sort of mood and moment curated playlists encourages this kind of more passive relationship with what you’re listening to. More functional relationship with what you’re listening to, and it’s like how, you know, much of a connection is actually being made between the listener and these 6,000 artists that you might have listened to through listening to Spotify curated playlists or niche mixes, for example. [00:29:00] And you know, in the trace the history of music being used as a tool of mood stabilization. And I think that the idea that this kind of way of engaging with music would be a means to discovery is almost funny when you put it in the context of other ways that music has been used as a means of mood stabilization throughout history. Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. And you do talk about things like Muzak the old BBC radio show, the music to work by and that sort of, affective control that music can offer. you talk a little bit about. The calculation that Spotify made, like there was a, there seems to be a moment when they realized that if we can make the experience of, listening to music, like utterly frictionless through the interface and perhaps make [00:30:00] it a little less more frictionless aesthetically, where it’s not quite as demanding of your attention, we can maximize the number of hours that people are using our product, which is what we really want, because either, either they’re going to integrate our product throughout their day and they’re going to paying for their subscription, or they’re going to hear as many ads as possible. And that’s going to help us that way. Right. So, I think the term that you use for this, you mentioned earlier is “lean back listening”. Can you maybe really delve into that a little bit more? Liz Pelly: I think that one of the things in that part of the book is trying to sort of look at what it means for a streaming service to sort of, champion this way of relating to music and what some of the consequences of it might be for listeners and for musicians. You know, it was really interesting talking to some former employees. And I had [00:31:00] this one conversation where someone said, you know, some of these bigger sweeping changes that have happened in the history of Spotify or on streaming platforms, these things that in retrospect might seem sort of like nefarious or like someone is trying to control listeners. A lot of times it’s people being tasked with moving a metric and their job is just to kind of look and say, well, when we put this playlist on the front page, , , people clicked on it and the listening sessions were healthy. So let’s just keep putting this on the front page, that kind of thing. Someone else explained one of the early goals of the playlist ecosystem as trying to reduce the cognitive work that the user had to do when they opened the platform, which obviously would also, for a user who may not know what they want to listen to would potentially lead to helping someone know what to click on, what they want to listen to, extending the [00:32:00] amount of time that they spend on the platform or extending a session length. It’s like these things that may be in the moment to the people who work there don’t seem like a big deal. are planting the seeds for these bigger cultural shifts where when you have an environment where all you’re doing is following the data and trying to optimize for this , frictionless user experience, to grow time on the platform, to grow session length, to in some ways, help shape user behavior around your own product. These things that might seem not that consequential. In the moment, add up and do you end up, I think, having a cultural impact. Mack Hagood: Absolutely. And I’m so glad you said that because we tend to always find villains around every corner. In my own research into these kinds of sound technologies that help us have affective control, I’ve really liked every single person I’ve met working in this space who are developing new forms of noise [00:33:00] cancellation or who developed, Practice of listening to artificial nature sounds, you know, it’s like I think cumulatively we have a social problem in which we’re we’ve become accustomed to the idea that are listening is something that’s supposed to be completely managed and we’re not supposed to experience anything we don’t want to hear. And I think that has major, bad effects for public discourse and interpersonal discourse and a lot of things. But the individuals who are working on these technologies are just trying to solve a particular problem generally. Like how do we eliminate noises that bother people? And you know, that it’s not… there’s no evil intent there. Liz Pelly: Right. Mack Hagood: Another thing that struck me about what you just said. It was the real emphasis on things being frictionless, which again, if you’re designing a platform that totally makes sense, friction is [00:34:00] good, right? Friction makes us stronger. Like, you know, if people, whatever, lift weights, like it’s the resistance that allows you to grow stronger. And the frictions that are involved in pursuing something are a big part of its aesthetic. Enjoyment and its meaning, right? the friction of going all the way to the record store and investing that time and flipping through stacks of stuff you’re not interested in and finding that one gem, that’s part of the enjoyment and it, calls to mind. this guy who designed one of the AI platforms that just spit out music for you. And he recently said in an interview that making music is too hard and musicians don’t enjoy it. And you have to do all these hours of practicing and you might not ever be good. And it’s like, as a guitar player, who [00:35:00] I’ve been playing since I was like 15 years old, like I’m 55 now. and I’m still not great. Right. Like, and, but it’s that struggle to get better. That is like part of the pleasure of playing. I’m like, this guy is totally missing the point of what musical experience is all about. That was a bit of a ramble, but, I mean, this dichotomy between making information flow as frictionlessly as possible seems to be at odds with giving culture meaning and having a rich experience with it. Liz Pelly: For sure. And I also think about it from another perspective, which is thinking about the role music critics have historically played in recommending and contextualizing music. And, I think about this way of recommending music in the most frictionless way possible and this idea, when you, when I hear [00:36:00] something like, “The founder of an AI company saying making music is too hard” People don’t want to learn how to play instruments or even, this idea that a streaming platform should help people reduce cognitive work. It’s like, That essentially means we should help people not have to think. And I think that, you know, like critics, what we do is encourage people to think, you know, thinking and making decisions is an important part of processing life in the world and information and culture and figuring out how you actually feel about someone’s art. As critics, we want to encourage people to think. And that’s why I describe this pursuit of a frictionless experience, this idea that people don’t want to make decisions, this idea of following the data and just being pushing this really data driven experience of receiving music. It’s like it’s not only not fulfilling [00:37:00] the role that critics, I mean, it’s obviously not fulfilling the role that critics have played historically in presenting into contextualizing music, but I also think it’s actively anti critical because it’s telling people, it’s encouraging people not to think and encouraging people to not think is, Extremely anti critical, anti intellectual. It’s like encouraging people to just trust the data. Just, you know, yeah, the music that we’re showing you, we’re showing you because the data has told us that you will like it. So you should just believe us and you should just. listen to it and like it, , Mack Hagood: Yeah, no, that’s right. And it’s encouraging us not to think and also sort of encouraging us not to feel, , you know, because I remember, gosh, it’s been probably 10 years. Now, I remember asking my friend, music journalist, Eric Harvey about things like, “Eric, what’s going on with hip hop?” Like , it all sounds so sad and [00:38:00] blasé and kind of mellow. Like it’s kind of aesthetically beautiful now, but it also is so dispassionate and I was like, what’s happening with that? And I think your journalism has really helped me connect the dots between the incentives of the platform and the kinds of music that succeeded. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed that about hip hop in particular, but I mean, You’ve certainly talked about the aesthetic of chill. So, can we maybe talk about what kinds of aesthetics seem to get privileged in this era of lean back listening? Liz Pelly: Well, I could say I also do think that a similar thing has happened, in the musical realm of like indie rock too, you know, like, they’re even talking to people who run indie rock labels for my book. There is this idea that music that was softer or that had softer vocal deliveries or more , emotionally, not flattened, [00:39:00] like less adventurous in terms of dynamic range, or something is the kind of music that does well in the streaming era. And, you know, it’s not to say that I think that’s the only type of music that people are making, but I think for people who aren’t making this sort of music like whispery, more chill, more soft music. It’s harder to break through. And I think it does encourage a general softening around the edges. There’s a chapter of the book called Streambait Pop, which is an extended take on this essay that I wrote in 2018 for the Baffler called Streambait Pop. They’re sort of looking more at this, in terms of the way in which the rise of mood playlists and playlists determined by emotions and affect were influencing the sound of music. Liz Pelly: For that piece, I talked to A pop songwriter who was talking about how it had been become common at the time to go into record, writing sessions and hear people say that they wanted to make, a Spotify song or a song specifically targeting specific [00:40:00] Spotify playlists. how there was this, you know, specific sounds that he felt like had emerged that time. And that was also around the time that a musician like Billie Eilish became really popular. It was this kind of whispery sort of pop music that could do well on these sort of like chill vibe or sad vibe playlists and it was interesting, going back to that piece in 2022/2023 when I was working on the book. I think by that point it became, really clear to me that it’s not just that streaming services, are shaping the sound of pop music, but there is a sort of like broader history that needs to be there to contextualize it, that, mediums for recording and releasing music and the technology that musicians and artists use to create their work have always impacted the sounds of, their music. Music and yeah, I know this is more of like an academics oriented podcast, but before I started writing my book, I read “Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Canged Music” by Mark [00:41:00] Katz. And that was really instructive and sort of like understanding this like broader history there. So that is referenced in my new updated version of Streambait pop in the book. but also, you know, it was interesting. Looking at these, effects of the playlist environment on not just pop music, but other sorts of genres as well. And yeah, speaking with people in other corners of music or operating on smaller scales about the impact of this as well. And I also took that chapter for the new expanded version of it. Talk to some songwriter, a songwriter who had participated in a Spotify songwriting camp, which was, really interesting to, hearing how some of these, aesthetic trends discussed within like the realm of, Spotify core were sort of like true to the kind of music that was like, at least in the case of this one musician, like true to the music that was coming out of those sessions as well. Mack Hagood: That’s fascinating. And then this songwriting camp, was it actually sponsored by [00:42:00] Spotify? Liz Pelly: Yeah. Yeah. It was hosted by Spotify. Mack Hagood: That’s wild. I remember some quotes from Greg Saunier from Deerhoof. Like the sort of, I can’t remember specifically, but he always has so many fiery takes on things, but particularly like this world, I mean, it’s funny in our last episode, we wound up mentioning Deerhoof for some reason. You can imagine Deerhoof in the way it leaps from one genre to another and demands your attention in a lot of interesting ways because it does so much unexpected musical work. Not really being a band that would work as well in the Spotify era. Liz Pelly: Yeah, I’ve interviewed Greg for the first piece that I wrote for the Baffler back in 2017, and then did another interview with him for my book. And I feel like, well, one, Greg just always has like so [00:43:00] many interesting things to say about the state of the world and even not just music. But yeah, I think they’re a really interesting band to kind of comment on this trajectory of the way that independent music has been impacted by the streaming era because they’re a band that has been making music really like on their own terms since the nineties and worked with so many of the labels that we think of when we think about the idea of independent music in the popular imagination and they also are an example of a band that like, you know, had a really dedicated fan base before the impacts of the streaming era, emerged. And I think they can sort of, but I think it’s always interesting. I think that lots of critics have different perspectives on this, on how we should consider the perspective of musicians whose careers span back to before the dawn of the streaming era something I’ll hear a lot is, critics saying, “Well, these artists are just complaining about the streaming era because they were, one of the lucky few who [00:44:00] happened to have careers in the pre streaming era” And it’s always been hard for everyone. So I don’t know. I think it’s actually kind of the opposite. I think that musicians whose careers span back to the pre streaming era are really well positioned to show. how things have changed and to speak to it. That’s something that is interesting about their perspectives. Mack Hagood: I agree with that. And I think these digital trends hit differently, generationally. So ultimately if Spotify could get people to tap on moods, it wouldn’t really matter that much what specific songs were found in those playlists. And then that paves the way for two phenomena that you have also written about, which is. Ghost artists and AI generated music. Can you talk about what’s been happening in that regard? Liz Pelly: Yeah. And I think that one thing that I tried to emphasize in the book is [00:45:00] how, there is this era where Spotify curated editorial playlists, often categorized by mood, had a really big cultural impact. And in some ways, There’s one former employee I interviewed who refers to 2016 to 2019 as the peak playlist era, but right off the bat, correctly points out that in the music business. Now the top of the discovery funnel has shifted away from these curated playlists made by Spotify editors. And now there’s a lot more influence coming from personalized feeds and algorithmic recommendations and platforms like TikTok and short form video as sort of, illustrating how discovery has really shifted in this next era of the digital music economy. But something that I try to point out or show is how there have been all of these effects of all of these sort of other impacts of listening being reshaped [00:46:00] around this concept of, you know, click here for happy, click here for sad, click here for chill, click here for upbeat party vibes, and how it’s not just, you know, that these platforms had a role reshaping listening around their own editorial playlists, but also that it paved the way and like helped prime this idea of listening to music, according to these types of buttons that you can press. And I think that, one of the, long term impacts of that does have to do with like the way in which in some ways it sort of encourages people to have more of a relationship with the playlist they’re listening to or the mood category that they’re they’ve organized they’re listening around than necessarily the artists and it again is like one of those things that could seem subtle but actually you know reorganizing music in a way where it is more about the , the vibe or the playlist category, then necessarily, , having any sort of [00:47:00] connection with the artists that are, , being played does in some ways, I think, set people up for, , being more desensitized to the way in which music made by generative AI could start either filling these playlists or, you know, like you think of something like earlier, you were talking about Suno or these kinds of generative AI music platforms, even something like Endel, which I talk about in the book, or, like these products that are basically just like click here for a vibe and we’ll give you an AI generated feed of music that fits that vibe. And you have no relationship at all with the people who are creating the music. In some ways I think the general playlist economy, the devaluing of the artists making the music you’re listening to, pointing people towards these, anonymous ghost artists, you know, essentially like low royalty stock music that has started to be over the years, has filled up some of these more leanback playlists. [00:48:00] Like I think it does have these bigger cultural impacts of just generally devaluing the role of the artist, in and prioritizing the role of, , the tech product or the, playlist name or the shaping a relationship around the product that’s delivering the music and not the music itself. Mack Hagood: Okay, folks, that’s it for this version of my interview with Liz Pelly. Remember, you can get the full interview and bonus content at patreon.com/phantompower. The Patreon has been growing slowly, but surely. And it’s a great motivator to keep these episodes coming. We also have free membership. So if you just want to join our email list and keep up with what’s happening around here, that’s a great way to do it. Again, it’s all at patreon.com/phantom power. And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks to Liz Pelly for being on the show, see show notes, links, and [00:49:00] more for this episode at phantompod.org. Please remember to subscribe to us and rate and review us on the platform of your choice platforms. And I want to thank my Miami University assistants, Katelyn Phan, Nisso Sascha, and Lauren Kelly for their help with the show. Josiah Wolf of the band WHY helped me make my intro soundscape and the one and only Alex Blue, aka Blue the Fifth, did our outro music. Got feedback? Send it to mac at mactrasound.com or hit me up on socials at Mactra. See you next time. The post How Spotify Dulls the Musical Mind (Liz Pelly) appeared first on Phantom Power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we discuss how narrative podcasts work, the role they’ve played in American culture and how they’ve shaped our understanding of podcasting as a genre and an industry. Neil Verma’s new book, Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession, offers a rich analysis of the recent so-called golden age of podcasting. Verma studied around 300 podcasts and listened to several thousand episodes from between the fall of 2014 when Serial became a huge hit to the start of the Covid pandemic and early 2020. It was a period when podcasts—and especially genres like narrative nonfiction and true crime—were one of the biggest media trends going. At the heart of these genres, Verma writes, was obsession–a character obsessed with something, a reporter obsessed with that character, and listeners obsessed with the resulting narrative podcast. Neil Verma is associate professor in Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University and co-founder of its MA program in Sound Arts and Industries. Verma is an expert in the history of audio fiction, sound studies, and media history more broadly. He is best known for his landmark 2012 book, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, which won the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Verma has been a consultant for a variety of radio and film projects, including Martin Scorsese’s film Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). In addition to his research, Verma has also created experimental sound recordings for broadcast. His compositions have been selected for several radio art festivals around the world, winning an honorable mention from the Sound of the Year awards in the U.K in 2020. For a fascinating listener Q+A with Neil, visit patreon.com/phantompower and get free access to this bonus episode in our patrons-only feed. Finally, we have big news: This will be the final episode of Phantom Power. But don’t worry, Mack will be launching a new podcast about sound in early 2025. To make sure you hear about the new show, receive our new newsletter, and get bonus podcast content in the coming months, sign up for a free or paid membership at patreon.com/phantompower. Transcript Mack Hagood 00:00 Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood. Today we talk with Neil Verma, author of the new book Narrative Podcasting In an Age of Obsession. Neil offers a rich, multifaceted and methodologically creative analysis of the so-called Golden Age of podcasting. And it’s pretty wild how intensively he studied this recent period of history, investigating around 300 podcasts and listening to several 1000 episodes, from between the fall of 2014 when Serial became a huge hit to the start of the COVID pandemic in early 2020. This was a period when podcasts and especially ones in genres like narrative nonfiction and true crime, were really one of the biggest media trends of that moment. And we’re going to talk about how narrative podcasts work, the role that they played in American culture, and how they shaped the cultural understanding of podcasting as a genre, and an industry. But first, last episode, I promised you some big news about this podcast. And here it is. This episode is not only our 15th, and final episode of the season, it’s also the last episode of Phantom Power. I’ve been producing this show since 2018, we’ve done over 50 episodes, and I’ve loved pretty much every minute of it. It’s been such a privilege to bring you these amazing guests, forge connections, and help foster a community in sound studies and acoustic ecology. It’s truly been one of the most fulfilling things that’s happened in my academic career. So why am I ending the show? Well, I’m starting a new podcast, it’s still going to be about sound, it’s still going to engage with the theories and practices of sound studies and acoustic ecology and sound art. But it’s going to be a more public facing and accessible kind of show. So you know, I’ve had this NEH grant for this year. And while I’ve been producing this show, and writing a book proposal for a trade press book, and while I’ve been doing that stuff, I’ve also been working about 20 hours a week on developing this new podcast. And just like I’m pivoting from writing an academic book to a mainstream nonfiction book, I want to do the same thing here, I want to present a highly polished narrative podcast for the public. I don’t want to say too much more about it right now. But just know that I’ll still be interviewing experts and artists, but the focus will be on telling stories, not in providing a really, you know, long form interview. So in a way, this is going to be getting back to what we attempted in the very early days of Phantom Power, but with even higher production values. I’m a finalist for a New America Foundation Fellowship. So if that comes through, I’m going to put all of those resources into this new podcast. And the good news is, well, actually, I think there are a few good pieces of news for Phantom Power listeners. The first one is that I’m going to do what’s called “feed jacking”. So the new show is just going to show up right here in the Phantom Power feed. So you’re not going to have to go look for it or do anything to get the new show when it launches in early 2025. Second, for those folks who are members of the Patreon, I’m going to keep dropping the occasional long form interview. I love Phantom Power for those who want that deeper dive. And I also, I’m going to have a newsletter because I thought I wasn’t enough of a walking cliche by having a podcast, I really needed to add the newsletter component to it. So yes, a newsletter, it’s going to have news about sound original essays, updates on my from my book research, and interviews with sound scholars. And of course, I’ll be updating you on the progress of the new show through that newsletter. If you’re interested in the newsletter, just sign up at patreon.com/Phantom Power for a free membership or a paid membership. And I’ll send that your way. It won’t be too frequent, probably once or twice a month. I’d also love for folks to sign up for a free membership just so that I can reach out this summer with a listener survey. I’m developing this listener survey to help me as I tried to figure out this new show and what it’s going to be. By the way, I got a Spotify message from a listener who said they couldn’t find the free option on Patreon. If you just go to the Patreon site, it’s a button right there at the top of the page that lets you join for free. And by the way, at the end of this episode, I’m going to thank by name all of our paid subscribers who have helped support the show this season. One other bit of cool news. Some of you may be familiar with the New Books Network. They are a really important podcast network that is distributing and documenting for posterity 1000s of conversations about new books you in all kinds of academic fields, and two weeks ago, they began rebroadcasting all episodes of Phantom Power in order once a week on the new books in sound studies feed, so this is going to take a year for them to release all the episodes week by week. So if anyone is interested in hearing it all again, or telling a friend, just Google new books and sound studies, or hit the link in the show notes. And finally, thanks to all of you who got in touch, to let me know how you use the podcast in your classes or in your work as a sound scholar or practitioner, y’all are doing some really cool stuff. And it’s so gratifying to hear how this show plays a tiny part in it. As I go up for full professor, I’m trying to compile a list of how Phantom Power has been used in university settings. So if you’re listening and you haven’t sent me an email, and you have something to add, please let me know. So just email me at hagoodwm@miami.oh.edu That is h-a-g-o-o-d-w-m as in Mack. And thank you. Okay. Wow, that was a lot of stuff. Again, thanks to all of you for listening. I hope you’ll stick around for the new show and also take the survey when I put it out so I can get some feedback in developing the new one. Okay, let’s get to it. Let’s talk about our guests. Neil Verma is one of the most innovative scholars I know of working in radio and podcast studies. He’s an associate professor in Radio, Television and Film and co-founder of the MA program in Sound Arts and Industries at Northwestern University. He co-founded that with past Phantom Power guests, Jacob Smith. Verma is an expert in the history of audio fiction, sound studies and media history more broadly, like a lot of great radio and sound scholars. Neil’s from Canada, he grew up in Burlington, Ontario, a small town 50 miles west of Toronto. He’s the son of a half French Canadian half Anglo Canadian school teacher, mom, and a dad who was a scientist originally from India. Neil Verma 07:15 He was the only brown skinned paleontologist in Canada in the 60s. And so he spent about 10 years trying to make a go of that and didn’t have a lot of success. So eventually, he kind of quit academia and started a business like a lot of immigrant families do. He started a printing company. And so we had sort of a mom and pop printing company when I was a kid. Mack Hagood 07:35 Radio wasn’t an obsession for Neil as a kid, but it was a constant companion. Neil Verma 07:40 I can’t remember a time when a radio wasn’t on in my kitchen. So yeah, part of the background texture of life for me when I was a child, but also so obvious, and so present that you don’t think about it. It’s like air. Mack Hagood 07:54 Neil got a BA in English from McGill University and a PhD in the history of culture from University of Chicago. He’s best known for his landmark 2012 book Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, which won the Best First Book Award from the Society for cinema and media studies where he is now a board member. By the way, if you haven’t dug into Theater of the Mind, you should really check it out. Even if you have no interest in radio drama, per se. Neil’s analysis of microphone techniques and how mic placement constructs a sense of auditory space is just so detailed and so useful. Neil is such an expert on radio drama that he was brought in as a consultant on Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, you might remember the movie ends in that radio drama segment. And Neil was the consultant that made sure that all of that stuff was historically accurate. So again, Neil’s new book is called Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession. And before we got into the obsession part, I asked Neil to define narrative podcasting, how would he define his object of study in this book? Neil Verma 09:09 So it’s both temporally located and structurally designed? Right? So I think that there’s a certain period where narrative podcasting has its most important prominence. And that’s essentially from the first season of Serial in 2014. To essentially now, I feel like it’s kind of at a point where the form has become less part of the center of podcasting as a conversation. The second way I define it is that narrative podcasts in natural language like if you listen to how podcasters describe their work, often what they talk about when they mean narrative is a form of story audio storytelling that oscillates between what we might call like a mimetic scene. So something that they’ve recorded on tape, maybe it’s an interview, maybe it’s an investigation in a certain place. And then something that’s narrated. So someone in a studio is talking, reading a script, often to a microphone. And that interplay between those two things is often described as narrative podcasting. Another way of talking about it is scripted podcasting. So podcasters often talk about it as a, you know, there’s one mode of operating, which is kind of like what we’re doing right now, which is talking to one another. Now, obviously, there’s often some scripting, or loose scripting in those circumstances. And then there’s the scripted podcast, which means like you have written it, you’ve edited it, it has a script, it has a text, it has a narrative life outside of that. Yeah. And then there’s a wide variety of ways in which podcasters define this kind of storytelling, often, it’s formulas that were derived from very successful podcasts like This American Life, where they’ll often say that, you know, you have to have a moment of tension, a detail, you have to have a moment of reflection, they’re often there are different formulas that are used to describe that sometimes they use it as physics, they sometimes use the word physics to describe it. So there’s a wide variety of definitions out there. I don’t necessarily subscribe to one. I think that narrativity is something that is contested. And its contestation is part of what’s interesting about it. That said, I mean, the podcasts that interest me most are those that have that kind of oscillation that I’m talking about, where there’ll be a scripted part where a person is talking to a microphone. And they’ll also be something that is like a scene or tape to which the narrator is talking. These are usually the podcasts that take the form of history podcasts, True Crime podcasts journalist like long form journalism, or audio dramas. And that’s typically the form they take, they’re generally more expensive to make than chat based podcasts. And, and even though they are a relatively marginal part of the overall podcasting landscape, they tend to have a larger cultural investment in them, for one reason or another. Mack Hagood 12:19 Yeah, and I’d like to come back to that in a moment. But maybe just to hold on to this sort of formal definition that you’re giving us here of this, this physics of podcasting, where there’s a sequence of actions, there’s the tape that the producer brings into the studio. But then there’s also the you know, one way I read glass of This American Life, put it as like the anecdote reflection point model, right, where you’re giving us the sequence of actions in in the course of a narrative, and then we pop out of the frame, and we’re back in the studio. And we’re like, why are we talking about this? I believe this has also been called, like the American style. Can you maybe talk a little bit about it? Neil Verma 13:03 Yeah, so Shavon McHugh, who started the radio doc review, kind of well known journalism scholar and journalist who makes podcasts as well, she’s a friend of mine. And so she often speaks kind of the American style of narration. An American here should denote something like This American Life, although it also refers to other kinds of shows like Snap Judgment-Radiolab to some extent. And this is kind of narrative driven in the sense that there is, the narrator ends up being the main character, it’s often someone who is talking to tape quite a bit, a lot of tape, it’s very framed. And it feels as if we’re on a journey with a journalist who’s trying to find something out. Mack Hagood 13:44 And that’s, that kind of brings us to what I think are maybe the emotional tone or emotional stakes of this mode of narrative podcasts, which is there’s a journalist who’s taking us on this intimate journey, there’s something intimate about this genre. Would you agree? Neil Verma 14:03 Yeah. The term intimacy is a complicated one to think about, partly because it’s really ubiquitous when people talk about radio of any form. And I think about it because of the way I look, the way I look at objects, like I think of it as an aesthetic, yeah, more than as something that’s innate to the medium. When we say intimacy, what do we mean? We mean, we have one narrator, their voice is closer to us than everybody else’s voice. Yeah, we know their name. They tell us their name. And we hear from them a lot. We feel very aligned with them. And those are all aesthetic choices. You know, you don’t have to tell the story that way. And often, that’s just the starting point for the aesthetic of the show. Often, someone, a host with whom we have an intimate connection will kind of pass us off to someone else, or take us through a world in a different kind of way. And so you know that I think that’s one dimension of intimacy. That’s aesthetic. Another dimension of intimacy, that, you know, I think is important. And you know, I’ve actually thought of your work a lot in this case is, often when we talk about the intimacy of audio, we’re talking about the intimacy of it, of our own experience of it are kind of like that, we tend to listen to it in headphones, we tend to listen to it through our phone, which is connected to our identity. And so there’s also a kind of like, proximal story to tell about intimacy that isn’t inherent to the medium, exactly. But it is somehow present in the technological configuration that most people experience it in. Yeah, that’s great. Okay, so we’ve thought about the sort of formal characteristics of narrative podcasting, and this kind of construction of intimacy that we sort of take for granted, probably culturally. Another question I have for you is why is this specific sub genre of podcasting, as you said, it’s not even most podcasts? Why does it seem to become synonymous with podcasting itself? Like, if you look at just if you just Google the history of podcasting, the first decade of the medium, like, basically, no one talks about it? Like if you look through these histories, they rarely talk about any shows in the first decade, it really all seems to start with this American life, and Serial like in 2014. Why has this genre become sort of definitional of podcasting? It’s largely because of other media. Because of this conversation, the conversation around these kinds of narrative podcasts took place in mainstream media in the New York Times in Vanity Fair in The Guardian. There were parodies on Saturday Night Live. Yeah, that ‘s also it’s experience was trackable. Because these podcasts grew up around the same time as social media. You could argue that one of the most important features of Serials popularity had to do with its relationship with Reddit and the enormous number of conversational threads that took place on Reddit as a result of the Serial serie-ality. So I think there’s a historical coincidence to it, and also a way in which it crossed into certain kinds of publications. It also is connected to prestige, audio work that had been going on in public radio stations for a generation before that. And so the kinds of creators who ended up making podcasts, many of them had cut their teeth on, you know, high end NPR shows that were really well produced and had incredible discipline to them. Many of them learn their craft from really excellent storytellers and kind of branched off of that. And then there’s also a part of it that kind of gets into the theme of the book, which is that the structure of a lot of podcasts, meaning how they’re oriented, tends to solicit an obsessive relationship with their listeners. And so you don’t just listen to something and then let go of it. You listen to something and feel called to respond or feel, like enjoined towards a task. You’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to keep thinking about it. And so one of the things that I found in a lot of the press coverage of Serial when it started to come out, was this word obsession, just kept coming over and over and over again, I’m obsessed with this podcast. This podcast obsesses me. And it’s really interesting to me that that’s the framework in which people culturally responded to this particular kind of text. I also think about it in contradistinction to streaming television, which was also kind of mourned at this moment. Streaming television, people describe using metaphors of addiction. I’m addicted to this, I’m binging this. But for podcasts, it was more about obsession, it had this more kind of deep emotional monomaniacal relationship. Nobody said that about This American Life. These were shows that were great, and he liked them. But you didn’t have that experience of it. And so that’s one of the things I really wanted to dig into with the book is like, what do we mean, when we use this word obsession? What is it in the text itself? Yeah, that gives us a permission structure to have an obsessive relationship to it. And more fundamentally, what does it mean to have an obsessive relationship to an art object? I mean, you’re making this broader argument. And I have to say, I had never thought of it this way. But this concept of obsession really is such a cool unlock on what was going on in this moment, where, like, you’re making this broader argument about the role that narrative podcast played in our like, not just the culture, but sort of the media ecology, at least as I’m reading what you’re talking about. I mean, there’s I feel like there’s the in the book, I kind of give two ways of historicizing. This rise of narrative podcasting and its relationship with obsession, how to intersect one is proximal, so very much A part of the public radio production culture is a fascination with what they often call the interesting. What makes a story interesting is often how you pitch something. It’s not just what happened. What’s interesting about it, is how a lot of people would pitch a story to a show like snap judgment of This American Life or radio lab studio 360, places like that. And the interesting thing isn’t, you know, as a concept, it’s elusive. What do we mean when we say something is interesting? Often we mean that it sparks our curiosity, but we can’t say why it stands out. But for reasons that are yet to be ascertained, and then the story often becomes how do we figure out what’s interesting about this story? And so I think that’s part of that’s kind of the proximal cause. But the question of why podcasts became obsessive isn’t just a story about the history of podcasting. It’s also a story about the history of obsession and obsession, as a historical idea that has its roots centuries old in legal and psychiatric and artistic contexts. And often, I lean a lot on Jan Goldstein’s work here, the history of obsession has been involved in boundary disputes, often when you’re trying to figure out what what is the domain of psychiatry, and what is the domain of the law, for example, then the issue of like obsessive thought and mono mania becomes really prominent. And I feel like that’s true here too is that in trying to figure out, you know, what counts as a radio show, and what counts as a podcast, the issue of obsessive thought has this outsized role to play in separating one from the other. So, Mack Hagood 21:42 Yeah, so obsession becomes, again, maybe touching back on that intimacy that was said to maybe even be like podcasting was perhaps even more intimate, at least as it was constructed than radio. You know, you talked about the very personal way that people would listen to them. And this sort of obsessive nature, it’s something that works inside of the podcasts. Like it’s sort of a trope within the podcasts that somebody is obsessed with something right. And then it’s also something that operates in terms of the listeners relationship to the podcast. And then it also Yeah, became part of a media narrative about what podcasting was and how it was different from radio. Could you maybe unpack that a little bit more? Yeah, Neil Verma 22:32 I mean, it’s hard. It’s hard to think about the material, like the actual material of a podcast, its relationship to its audience, and also how it’s talked about without this concept of obsession. Yeah, you know, if you listen to a podcast from this period that I focus on in the book from about 2014 to 2020, you know, nine times out of 10, the podcast is going to start in the same way, which is something like dear listener, here’s the story that came up, I came across, and I can’t stop thinking about it. And I think I’ve become obsessed with it. And often the obsession is kind of confessed in this negative way. Like it’s a secret, or something that you should be ashamed of. Yeah. And I can’t stop thinking about it. So I’m gonna make this podcast that explores this topic. And maybe it’s a historical topic. Maybe it’s the case of a murderer. Maybe it’s, you know, maybe it’s a fiction podcast in which a character is kind of aping a lot of the same characteristics as an investigative podcast. Mack Hagood 23:27 Maybe it’s why hasn’t anyone seen Richard Simmons? Neil Verma 23:31 That’s a good example, or mystery shows a lot like this Serial is a lot like this anyway, that they start out this way. And the host says, and often like the obsession object can be very trivial, or it can be something that the audience members never heard of. Or it can be something that the audience member thinks they understand, but they don’t understand. Anyway, and then the podcast kind of proceeds not just investigating the story, but investigating one’s own obsession with it. And many podcasts in this kind of sub genre. It’s not even exactly a sub genre in this paradigm, they end without a solution to whatever it is, the historical nugget was, but there seems to be a solution to the obsessive relationship to it. And I think that’s one of the things that connects obsession to the structure of podcasting itself. What makes podcasts different from radio shows, they’re longer, a lot longer, sometimes 10 times the length of an ordinary radio show. And so the arc of the story, or the arc of the podcast often follows the arc of the narrator’s obsession with that topic. That’s what gives it a beginning, middle and end that’s often what gives it a cliffhanger. This is true for the first season of Serial, the cliffhanger at the end of every episode of the first season of Serial isn’t a non sighted guilty, it’s will Sarah change her mind about this person. And so it’s really about this kind of interiorized mental churn that we get a vicarious experience of. Mack Hagood 25:03 It’s just interesting to think about the temporality of this, that the fact that podcasts are not limited by certain conventions of broadcasting certain formats, it didn’t have to be a certain number of minutes long-sort of lent itself to this kind of obsession, you are free to just pursue your passion to the ends of the earth and let it take as much time as it took. Yeah. Neil Verma 25:27 And you know, and I don’t want to be moralistic about this. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. And an awful lot of podcasts are devoted to subjects that a lot of the journalists who made them had been dying to make for their whole career, and never had the resources to make. Right and so a lot of these are stories, particularly of murders of people of color, or unjust imprisonment, things like that had the podcasting boom never happened would have been left unspoken. And so it’s given an opportunity for a whole lot of hidden histories, particularly histories that had to do with justice issues, to come to the fore. And that’s an incredible benefit of the obsessive and obsessive relationship to an object isn’t like an inferior aesthetic agenda. Sometimes it’s really interesting. Sometimes it’s really interesting that, you know, one of the podcasts I like to think about is 99% Invisible, which podcast fans will will probably know is kind of a pioneering podcast in the prestige area, also a lead podcast in the radio topia network, incredible fundraiser lots of good things about this show hosted by Roman Mars. And what that show would often do is they would find some particular object in the world, the shows about architecture, design, the built environment, and maybe it’s a form of concrete, or maybe it’s the one I use in the book is at the escalators at the DC metro, and how each one has been weathered to the point where it makes a different sound. Yeah, so they’ll find some object and then they’ll find somebody who’s obsessed with it. And so the host with whom we have an intimate connection introduces us to the surrogate, who I think of as like the surrogate obsessive who has an obsessive relationship to some object, in this case, the sound of different escalators in Washington, DC. Now, I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of people who listen to this podcast have no interest at all in the sound of escalators in Washington DC. But by virtue of the fact that obsession has been mapped from this one kind of legitimate obsessive into the consciousness of the host with whom we have an intimate connection. And then into our ears. All of a sudden, this feeling of transference of obsession from one mind to another is really vivid and it has a way of making this object enjoyable. And then the book I analogize this a little bit to Rene Girard’s idea of mimetic desire, you know, where we desire something because someone else desires it. And we mimic that, that desire in a kind of triangle relationship. Something very similar is happening in podcasts in this period, I find that like, just aesthetically fascinating, and really interesting to track. Mack Hagood 28:14 So that’s the concept you call mimetic obsession. Neil Verma 28:18 Yeah. Yeah. So if you imagine, like a typical podcast, like Serial, for example, the first season of Serial, you know, one of the first things that Sarah Kenick, the host says to us is, “I don’t think I’m obsessed with this story. But I am kind of fascinated by it.” And then over the course of it, it feels like an obsession, it becomes very much the idea of it. So often, the host confesses obsession then retracts it right away. But there’s this other configuration, which we find pretty often, which is more triangular. So the host finds somebody else who is obsessed with the subject, and that has a way of ratifying or legitimizing or making it more vivid and interesting. And often those are those that are totally lighter and funnier. Mack Hagood 28:59 One of my favorite passages in the book is I believe this was in the in the introduction, but he wrote that the age of obsession in podcast media for the American left was the age of conspiracy in social media, for the American right, it is not outside the realm of possibility that an itch, that Serial scratched for one population is the same itch that QAnon scratched for another. And something that this immediately made me think about was, at the same time that this sort of intelligentsia were just basically saying podcasting was synonymous with this kind of narrative podcast, the Joe Rogan show was already well underway and like churning along and really questioning authority in all kinds of ways. So I would love for you to just expand on this notion that maybe these different genres are scratching a similar itch, and where that itch comes from. Neil Verma 29:59 So one of the pleasures of writing a book, which is different from writing a dissertation, is that in a dissertation, everything is assertion, right? This is, so this is how it is. But in the book, you get to have these phrases where you’re like, maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that, you know, and you get permission to use the word perhaps every now and then. And so this was a real perhaps statement for me. But it’s rooted in something that the book does argue: there’s a writer named Marina van Zuylen who wrote a book about obsession in French literature, and obsession is very common in the arts in French culture. Think of writers like Flaubert or Balzac, you know, a variety of artists from the contemporary period. And one of the things she talks about is that one of the things that monomania, like a monomaniacal relationship to an object gives you is that it gives you a false sense of control over it, that it’s a kind of reaction to the shock of modernity, that modernity inundate you with certain kinds of experiences, and monomania allows you to control it. So it kind of takes and gives at the same time, like it feels like a debilitation, but it also feels like a form of power. And so it has that complicated relationship that a lot of kinds of psychic conditions have with the exterior world. And so I got thinking about this. And I started to think a lot about well, what is it about obsession that it gives us like, what does it provide? And I started to think a lot about just the rise of streaming experiences in our lives and kind of algorithmically curated feeds of material, whether that’s through social media, whether that’s through your Netflix account, whatever it is, and how obsession kind of has that same relationship with raw material as algorithmic feeds do. So. If you’re interested in barbarian movies that have wooden machines in them, then if you watch one, Netflix is going to recommend the next barbarian movie with a wooden machine in it to you, because it thinks that’s what you’re into. And maybe you are, I’m not judging. Mack Hagood 32:02 How did you know? Neil Verma 32:06 So a monomaniacal thinking process mimics what the algorithm does, right? It seeks more, more of what it already knows, right? it churns through the same thing over and over again. So on the one hand, it mimics that, but on the other hand, it feels like you’re extracting a level of control over that thing, right. So if I’m obsessed with something, that it’s my obsession, it’s personal. To me, it’s specific. And that makes me different from whatever it is, feels like you’re feeding me. So it allows you to have that kind of you sort of mimic a lot of the mediated experiences we already have. And also have a feeling of resting control from them, that feels rebellious and nourishing, and a little bit naughty. And I feel like that’s an emotional experience that resonates very closely with conspiracy theories. Obviously, the politics of these things are very different. And there is a reality to which both of them must somehow come to grips. But I’m just thinking about the kind of aesthetic and emotional relationship we have with some of these media. And I’ve seen more similarity than I see difference. Mack Hagood 33:14 Yeah, and I mean, I think there’s a relation in both cases, to these niche rabbit holes of media that that we’ve been afforded in recent decades, and the sort of related deterioration of trust in authority, Sarah Koenig doesn’t trust the justice system that justice has been done in this case, and she’s going to dig into it. And then there’s also this sort of intensification of individual identity and small group identities as a locus of meaning that I think has really been a characteristic of the early 21st century. These are all aspects of our culture that I think really feed into the This American Life Style narrative podcast, you know, which can be so again, constructed as personal as intimate. Neil Verma 34:06 Yeah, and, you know, a lot of the criticism that was made of the obsessive style during its sort of heyday. And one of them is that it can be quite easy to make the obsession of the story, and not the systematic critique the story. And so you know, a good contrast to draw there is with the in the dark podcast, which investigated a couple of different ones. One was a murder case of young boy. And then the other was a conviction case in where the, the accused guy was, was tried over and over and over again by the same prosecutor. And what In the Dark does is it focuses very much on the work of journalism, and it focuses very much on systematic critiques of bad laws and, you know, bad judicial practices, and bad police practices. And those often for a lot of listeners became kind of the antidote to works that were too obsessively related to their material because they didn’t effectively address systematic critiques that could also be made. So I feel like the fact that that is a polarity at all is an important aspect of, you know, identifying what was it about podcasts in this period that people found so compelling. Mack Hagood 35:18 There’s another aspect to this, where it’s about the this forward thinking that podcasting is going to be the big new thing. And that somehow this obsession and this narrative obsession tied very closely into that. So we’ve talked about a lot of different levels of obsession, but maybe could we talk a little bit about the tech industry and how this sort of obsessive nature perhaps played into this imagination of the lucrative podcast future? Neil Verma 35:51 Sure. I mean, so my book is a book about the past. And I really feel that the cultural moment that describes this over, that doesn’t mean podcasting is over, podcasting is going to continue to evolve and take all kinds of new forms and have relevance in a lot of different contexts. I’m not worried about the podcasting industry disappearing in any way, it’s going to change a lot. But that’s how these things go. But I think about one of the things that was sort of a perennial feature of discourse about podcasting from about Serial to about the COVID period was that everyone was talking about it as a brand new thing, that this is an exciting new thing, there’s going to be a lot of money in it. And it’s going to be the future of audio, people were talking about it as a Gutenberg revolution. And there was a lot of really excited rhetoric. So a couple of things I want to do in the book is one to like back off of that excited rhetoric. I think one of the problems that we sometimes have as critics is that we fall for that pretty easily, partly because our interests are aligned with that too, right? We want to be writing about topics that feel fresh and vivid. And sometimes that can obscure a bunch of questions and ideas and properties of a thing. When you think about something as something of the past versus thinking about it as something of the future, it changes. And so I feel like this feeling that I call it proleptic imaginary that everything people said about podcasting, or conceptualism about podcasting was framed by an anticipation of a glorious future that I think that feeling has passed at this point. But the second thing I want to think about that is that proleptic, imaginaries are generative, they make things possible, they make it possible for people to start businesses or to pitch podcasts and get them funded. They make it possible for conferences on the definition of podcasting, they make it possible for a whole kind of flood of expanding thought and rapidly changing concepts of how podcasting should operate as an industry. So having a proleptic imaginary can obscure critical thought, but it can also generate media activity. And so striking a balance between, you know, thinking about those two things at the same time, is one of the things that the book tries to do. This period of podcasting growth coincided very strongly with a whole bunch of other things, the rise of social media, it coincided with the rise of streaming services coincided with the rise of NF T’s and bitcoins and things like that. And a lot of the terminology that was used to describe one was used to describe the other. So there’s a certain effervescence that the podcasting rise partook in at this period. And so that’s something that I want to historicize and to like make into a historical object that we can talk about, and we can think about. Mack Hagood 38:35 One last question about obsession towards the end of your chapter on obsession, you think about obsession, as a method for the podcast scholar to deploy. Could you maybe talk a little bit about what you were playing with there? Neil Verma 38:53 Okay. So this is the weird part about the chapter. So the way I think about podcasts, the way I think about anything, the way I work generally as a thinker, is that I like to zero in really closely on really specific moments. So at the beginning of the chapter, for example, I there’s like one sentence in the first episode of Serial that it’s been 10 pet pages talking about. And then I’d like to zoom out and say, Okay, well here are like 50 other examples of this kind of phenomenon. And here’s how they have different sub variants. And here’s how they evolve over time. And I kind of keep doing that, like I zoom in on something and then I’ll back off, and then I’ll zoom in, I’ll back off. And then this weird thing happens, where I start to think that maybe the cultural phenomenon I’m describing should actually feed back into my methodology itself. So if it’s true that obsessive relationships existed within podcasts between podcasts and their listeners, within the cultural imaginary of podcasting, isn’t it also true that obsessive relationships exist in a critical relationship to a podcast? Because if you don’t do that, then it’s like you’re standing outside of it from a superior position. Even without any involvement in the culture that you’re describing, and that’s just not true, of course, there’s some sort of involvement. So I started to imagine what what would an obsessive analysis of a podcast look like not one that avoids obsession, but actually kind of walks into it. Mack Hagood 40:16 And specifically from your subject position. Neil Verma 40:19 Yeah. And I think that’s important that it should come partly from the podcast itself, which come from some of its features, some of the things that it foregrounds, but should also come from your own subject position, and something that genuinely you felt kind of stuck to you in a certain kind of way. So for me, one of the things that I found so oddly compelling about the first season of Serial was this little vocal crack that appeared in Adnan Sayyed’s voice. In as voice scholars will know, often we have a chest voice, and then we have a head voice. Sometimes they’re called different things. And then often when you’re speaking, sometimes you can crack a little bit, like, a little bit when you’re kind of passing between one or the other. Often, it’s involuntary, it’s a sound that we associate with a kind of sudden loss of identity, we often associate it with adolescence, and I just can’t unhear it. He uses it in his voice a lot. And so one of the things I thought about, well, what would an obsessive read it one obsessive reading of Serial, from my perspective would be to map out all of those focal cracks, episode by episode, and then to try and do a close reading of them. And to suggest what they mean. Now, obviously, it would be foolhardy to say, well, this is what what Sayyed’s real character is because obviously, this is an edited podcast. And so the podcasters decided what audio to include what audio not to include. So it’s hard to say, what this person is saying versus what the podcast is saying. But I think it’s it became a useful methodology for me to like unpack particular sequences, I don’t think you can come up with global rules for the series based on Adnan Sayyed’s vocal cracks. But it gives you a different way of reading key sequences, and I think a rich one. So you know, one thing I want to prompt maybe provocatively in the book is to say, maybe there’s a methodology for analyzing obsessive podcasts that embraces obsession, rather than exteriorize it or others it or turns it into an object of ridicule or demystification. Mack Hagood 42:19 And you go to the extent of using some quite sophisticated digital humanities techniques to analyze sort of like the pitch contours of Sayyed’s voice, could you maybe talk a little bit about the technology you used? And in this deep dive? Neil Verma 42:35 Sure, yeah. So a couple of years ago, I got a NEH grant with Martin MacArthur, who is a poet and an English scholar at UC Davis and merit studies poet voice, she studies how it is that poets speak and how that speeches is talked about. And so I was interested in radio plays, and she was interested in, in poetry readings. What makes these two things similar is that they’re both performed speech. So the poet has a poem in front of them that they’re reading, a different poet might read it differently. They might write read it and read it a different way. And so we were looking for ways in which we can analyze these in kind of a close reading kind of way, and understand them, you know, like kind of the micro level. So what does that look like? That looks like in her case? Where is the poet pausing? Is the poet pausing in the places where the text would suggest to pause? Are they pausing somewhere else? When a poet is described as monotone? Are they really monotone? Can we actually find some sort of way of analyzing the pitch of each speech act that suggests maybe they’re not maybe there’s some other kind of cultural reason why people are calling them monotone. Often ideas about race and gender come out, when you look at some of this criticism that doesn’t actually comport with the sound of the audio. So anyway, and in my case, I got interested in things like Orson Welles is a well known radio actor, he often plays both villains and heroes, he often plays both narrator’s and characters in the play. And so I was interested in does he talk differently in these different places. So we develop with Robert Akshore and Lee Miller, two scientists at Davis, a couple of different technologies, these aren’t exclusive to these particular technologies. There’s lots of software that does this. And essentially, what it does is it analyzes speech for things like pauses, pause rates, and it generates a pitch tracker. So you can see exactly that vocal crack I told you about. And if you feed the both the text and the the audio into the into Drift, which is what the technology is called, then it will show you exactly how many how many hurts that the jump is. And so it’ll, it’ll help you confirm the things that you’re already here’s, and it’ll also like, give you some sort of basis for describing what that phenomenon is. You know, I don’t think that this is like going to work in every situation for everything. It’s just another tool or another way of thinking about it. And it also does that thing that allows you to talk about, you know, micro moments in a podcast in the same way you could talk about micro moments in a novel or a poem. Mack Hagood 44:58 Yeah, super cool. One of many moments of sort of methodological innovation in your work. So I really appreciated that. So we’ve really done a deep dive on obsession. That’s actually only one of several themes about narrative podcasting. In this book. I really don’t think we can do justice to all of them. But just briefly, you know, there’s a chapter on the way that these narrative podcasts often call into question how we know things. So sort of these epistemological questions that are characteristic of this genre. Neil Verma 45:35 The second chapter is about epistemology. It’s a bit more of a detailed argument, but the that one is more like, you know, anyone who studies public radio will know that one of the main things that public radio producers often aim for is the production of empathy, and that a successful radio show is often one that produces empathy, kind of cathartic empathy for the listener. And my view is, is that a lot of podcasts kind of started to question the politics of that, at a certain point, especially around issues of race and gender. And what a lot of these podcasts ended up doing was kind of backing off the optimization of empathy, and got interested in in more something more like epistemology, like how it is, we know what we know, what are the limits to what we can know. And so there’s a bunch of ways in which I describe certain patterns of that. And often they have to do with issues of wide variety of issues. But you know, things like racial justice, for example, what is the knowable in certain cases, and some of them can be quite nihilistic. Some of them end up in places where they feel like nothing is knowable. So that chapter kind of focuses mostly on epistemology. And then the third chapter focuses mostly on audio dramas, and how this funny thing about audio dramas history is that it’s always kind of obsessed with memory. So many of these plays are about memory and remembering, and forgetting and amnesiacs, and all these kinds of things. And yet, the form of audio drama historically has no memory of its own. The distinction I like to draw is between something like the lyric poetry, right, if you’re a lyric poet, or say portraiture, so if you’re a lyric poet or a portrait artist, you have to study the whole history of lyric poetry, or portraiture, you don’t even have anything that anyone would find legitimate to say. Audio drama is the exact opposite. Like the vast majority of audio dramatists do not study its origins, right. And in some ways, that’s great. Like that’s actually incredibly makes it liberatory. It means it’s much more inclusive than other kinds of of art forms. But it also creates this like weird relationship with the past, where it’s always kind of reinventing the past. And it’s kind of obsessed with the past, but also disavowing the past. So I call that an aesthetics of amnesia. And I talked about podcasts like The Shadows by Caitlin Prest and Homecoming, as good examples of this. And then in the end, there’s kind of a coda where I have a bit of a moment where this was originally going to be a whole chapter. But I felt like it could be actually just a CODA, which was, you know, in the 2010s, we are always talking about this internet based podcasting as a form. But this was also like an era of the renaissance of of radio arts and people who are intervening in the electromagnetic spectrum itself. And so I talked about a few artists who are very much outside who will make work that you would never describe as a podcast. But were able to kind of ask questions in ways that were in some ways more interesting and exciting and insightful than podcasters could ask. radio artists are obsessed with, you know, emplacement and materiality and the structures of media around us. And this is something that podcasters tended to ignore, there aren’t a lot of podcasts that kind of exploit the architecture of their own possibility. But that’s all that radio artists did. So I find that that distinction kind of interesting, and also productive of a possible future for podcasts. Mack Hagood 48:45 Yeah, that’s great. So the book is Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Bbsession, and it’s a great read. You really do come at this from so many different angles. Neil, thanks so much. This has been a blast. Neil Verma 48:58 Yeah, it’s been such a great conversation and I appreciate you giving me such a chance to talk about my work here. So yeah, I love the pod and I’m really excited to be on it. The post Podcasting’s Obsession with Obsession (Neil Verma) appeared first on Phantom Power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices