In this keynote presentation, Gascia Ouzounian tracks the rise of the binaural listener through a consideration of 19th-century technologies and sciences of spatial hearing.

Over the course of the nineteenth century there emerged a new kind of listening subject: the binaural listener, an auditor who listened through a binaural apparatus and observed sound in three dimensions. The binaural listener was a product of nineteenth-century techno-scientific and sonic cultures, formed at the intersection of an emerging science of spatial hearing, the development of new binaural and stereo technologies, and the experience of hearing technologically mediated sound and music in three dimensions. These developments took place in a wider cultural context whereby “space” was increasingly understood not only as an absolute mathematical or geometrical phenomenon, but also in sensorial terms—as something that could be sensed by the human subject.

I argue that the binaural listener was a descendent of the binocular viewer that, as Jonathan Crary (1990) has argued, emerged around the same time in connection to three-dimensional viewing apparatuses like the stereophone. A science of binaural audition emerged in connection to an existing science of binocular vision, and early theories of auditory space perception were developed in connection to existing theories of visual space perception. I show that this reliance on the ocular and optical resulted in a distinct visual bias in early ideas of auditory space perception, including in ways that would surprise us today, with some scientists arguing that ‘distance was no possible object of hearing’. Nevertheless, by the early twentieth century, it was generally agreed among scientists that humans can hear spatially. This talk explores how and why this happened, taking turns through such phenomena as seemingly magical instruments such as the Enchanted Lyre, endocephalic sounds that seemed to emanate from inside listeners’ heads, and hearing distant theatre performances and opera over telephone wires, in stereo.

•  Cole Mash (Simon Fraser U), "‘Turn First to the Body’: Towards Rereading the Body, Media, and Context in Contemporary Performance Poetry"
•  Emily Collins (York U), "See(ns)ing Sound and Resistance in Christine Sun Kim"
•  Matthew Kilbane (U Notre Dam), "Russell Atkins’s Psychovisual Object-Forms and Non-Dominant Listening"

•  Teddie Brock (Simon Fraser U), "Listening to the Inaudible: Navigating Networks Through Poetry and Field Recording"
•  Joseph Chaves (U of Northern Colorado), "Indirect Signals and the Scene of Recording"
•  Craig Farkash (Concordia U), "A Sense of Rhythm: Rhythm as a Sensori-Historical Listening Practice"

•  Cecily Devereux (UAlberta), "Sounds Like Patriarchy: Lola Montez and the Hiss"
•  Katherine McLeod (U Concordia Montreal) and Emily Murphy (UBCO), "Reverberations of Duende in Canadian Poetics"
•  Scott Inniss (Independent), "Ghost Notes and Decolonial Re-Reverberation in Rachel Zolf’s Janey’s Arcadia"

•  Rob Shields (U Alberta), "The Social and Political Merits of Inner Voices"
•  Jessica McDonald (U Saskatchewan), "Listening to Walmart"
•  Amandine Coquaz (Concordia U), "Listening to Montreal: A Creative Exploration of the City’s Linguistic Common Grounds"

• Christina Goestl (Independent), "The Universe is Not Only Queerer Than We Suppose, It Is Queerer Than We Can Suppose" [experimental storytelling]
• Moynan King (Western), "Queer Medz: Togetherness and Reverberational Healing" [public meditation]
• Clint Burnham (Simon Fraser U), Lillington Road [performance]

• Panelists: Jessie Beier (Concordia U), Sourayan Mookerjea (U Alberta), Mark Simpson (U Alberta)

The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) is a collaboratively-authored research-creation intervention that explores myriad ecological, cultural, and political resonances of the three concepts named in its title: energy; emergency; repair. The E.E.R.K combines image, text, and sound to riff on the idea of a repair manual—that staple genre of self-help and self-making—while exploring energy emergency and energy emergence in several entangled registers. The panel presentation will introduce the various sonic dimensions and dynamics of the E.E.R.K. so as to explore the import of sound for the reckoning of energy and its emergencies.

•   Jacqueline Wylde (St. Francis Xavier U), "Listening and Singing: Sonic Reimaginings of the English Metrical Psalms (1548-1660)"
•   Phillip Kohl (Ludwig Maximilian U of Munich), "The Acoustic Space of Ideology: Engineering Reverberation in the Soviet Union"
•   Miranda Eastwood (Concordia Montreal U), "Networked, Episode One: Reconstructing Data"

•  Patrick Feaster and Xiaoshi Wei (SOAS U of London), "The Möllendorff Cylinders: Incunabula of Chinese Literary Audio"
•  Kristen Smith (York U), "Out-sounding Disappearance: Performances of Erasure Poetry"
•  Abhipsa Chakraborty (SUNY Buffalo), "Vernacular Acoustics: Speech, Embodiment and the Politics of Listening in Mulk Raj Anand’s Writings"

•  Angus Tarnawsky (Concordia Montreal), "Walking and Listening on the Lachine Canal"
•  Stephanie Loveless (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), “This Street is a Song: Situated Listening in a Contested Site”
•  Sara Dorow, Sean Luyk, and Scott Smallwood (U Alberta), "Listening to the “Meaning of Work”

Engage with the histories and experiences of the Indigenous peoples of the Edmonton region through a walking tour of the river valley led by Dr. Dwayne Donald (Métis-Cree) of the Faculty of Education. By walking together through the river valley and sharing stories, Dwayne hopes to provoke a place-based ethical imagination guided by kinship teachings.

*Note: Spots for group activities are limited. Sign-up at registration or contact sw23[at]ualberta.ca.

In this experiential session, sound artist and researcher Stacey Bliss will briefly introduce her work with gong cultures and basic gong philosophy of ‘You are a Gong.’ Then, she will lead the group through breathing and humming exercises, followed by a sonic immersion (gong bath or sound meditation).

*Note: Spots for group activities are limited. Sign-up at registration or contact sw23[at]ualberta.ca.

A tour of the Sound Studies Institute, culminating in an artist's talk by Rachel Epp Buller and the debut of her new sound exhibit "Reverberations of Winter Walking."

In January 2022, I moved to Edmonton, in the dead of winter, and embarked on a four-month daily walking practice. I walked in the snow and I walked in the River Valley. I walked with those who had walked before me and I walked alongside coyotes and snowshoe hares. Walking became one of my ways of listening in this place.

Come experience Winter Walking, an 8-channel sound piece on display in the Sound Studies Institute. My presentation will address walking as a form of whole-body listening—hearing, sensing, perceiving, attuning—that might reverberate as a relational and reparative practice.

*Note: Spots for group activities are limited. Sign-up at registration or contact sw23[at]ualberta.ca.

An evening of live poetry and sound at The Common featuring a collaborative performance by Jordan Abel, Conyer Clayton, Manahil Bandukwala, Liam Burke, and Nathanael Larochette. Followed by an open-mic poetry event.

• Kristine Smitka (Director, CLC), Nicole Brandsma, and Yaghma Kaby (UAlberta, CLC researchers)
• Shannon Webb Campbell (author)
• Sean Luyk (Digital Projects Librarian, UAlberta)
• Karis Shearer (SpokenWeb’s Pedagogy Task Force, UBC Okanagan)

Inside the Bag is the Centre for Literatures in Canada / Centre de littératures au Canada’s archive of recordings of literary and scholarly readings and lectures from the past 16 years of the Centre’s programming. Co-hosted by the CLC, the launch event at the SpokenWeb symposium in May will highlight the resonances between the Centre's archive of contemporary recordings and SpokenWeb’s archive of historic Canadian literary readings, offering scholars, writers, and the reading public a chance to encounter the archive through the theoretical interests and questions foregrounded by SpokenWeb.

Introduced by Dr. Kristine Smitka, the Acting Director of the CLC in 2023, the launch of this archive will open with a short recorded sound collage featuring a selection of the archive’s many voices, and it will conclude with a conversation about what it means to create archives of this nature for readers and researchers. Shannon Webb Campbell, a mixed settler and Mi’kmaq poet and author of Lunar Tides (2022) and I am a Body of Land (2019), will reflect on the intimacy of recording her own voice as she created one of our “covid edition” podcast readings, a task that, she reports, transformed her engagement with the medium of recording.

•  Sophia Magliocca (Concordia Montreal), "A Study of the Social Q&A: Listening for 'Camaraderie Tenderness' in Microcollaboration"
•  Jason Wiens (U Calgary), "Marvin Francis’ Reverberative Poetics"

•  Anna Navarro (Independent), "Behind Us Was the Sea: Poetic Listening Practice for Filipino Diasporic Archives"
•  Jasmin Macarios (U Ottawa), "Queer Coding the Audio Archive: Linked Data and the Lesbian Organization of Toronto (LOOT) Oral History Tapes"
•  Leah Van Dyk (U Calgary), "Alden Nowlan and the Sonic Commonplace Book"

•  Samuel Adesubokan (U Victoria), "Radio and Tactical Listening in a Yoruba Sound World"
•  Jentery Sayers (U Victoria), "An Activity Theory of Game Audio for Genre Studies"
•  Asia Tyson (U Victoria), "Sound and Spatiotemporal Boundaries in Alien: Isolation"

•  Stacey Bliss (U Alberta), "Sound & Social Systems – Harmony & Dissonance: Themes from a Sonic Ethnography"
•  Ella Jando-Saul (Concordia Montreal), "Reconstructing Conversations: Pathways to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the Organization of Literary Events"
•  Dorothy Santos (UCSC), "Speculating an Ethics for Sonic Futures"

•  Rémy Bocquillon (Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt), "Making Audible the Inaudible: Sound and Space As Matters of Concern"
•  Jimmy Eadie (Trinity College Dublin), "Sounding Art, Intermediality and the Aural Pivot"
•  Jacqueline Shea (Arizona State University), "The Shape of Sound: (Dis)Harmonic Socioecological Systems and Songs"

•  Ipek Oskay (U Alberta), "Soundscape Encounters with Non-Human: On Soundscape Justice and Critique of Synoecism"
•  Richard Costa (UAlberta), "The Soundscape Ecology of Francisco López in La Selva"
•  Jami Reimer (Simon Fraser U), "Speculative Bioacoustics, Interspecies Audibility, and the Posthuman Choir"

In the first recording of “From the Prairies to the Pacific Rim,” poets Emily Riddle, Sacha Ouellet, and Erica H Isomura (along with Rita Wong) came together to trace ancestry, activism, and rivers between Amiskwaciwâskahikan in the Prairies, across the Rocky Mountains, and into the Salish Sea.

In this plenary, the poets build upon previous work to address reverberations of waterways via trade routes, resource extraction, and food sources in urban and rural landscapes. From the effects of pollution on Indigenous nationhood to land and water rights, these artists consider how we might include levity while speaking to dire consequences of colonial systems at play.

• J. R. Carpenter (Winchester School of Art) and Jules Rawlinson (U of Edinburgh), An Island of Sound [performance]
• Guillaume Tardif (U Alberta), Waves upon Waves: Compressed Reflections from a Recording Restoration Odyssey [demo + performance]
• Wayne Defehr (U Alberta), What is the Sound of the North Saskatchewan River? A Settler and Indigenous Collaboration [performance]
• Klara du Plessis and Jimmy le Blanc (U Concordia Montreal), The Reverberation of Violent Sound: A Screening and Discussion of Light, a Mono-Opera [screening + Q&A]