Chair: Geoffrey Rockwell

• Panelists: Yelena Gluzman (University of Alberta), Ben Tucker (University of Alberta)

Join artists and scholars Yelena Gluzman and Ben Tucker for a panel discussion on artificial voices, focusing on how and why text to speech technologies are generated. The session will start with a screening of STS scholar Yelena Gluzman's short film Invisible Machines which is about captioners, mediation and transforming talk to text. Gluzman's film will be followed by a presentation by Ben Tucker about Alberta Phoentic's Laboratory's project to develop talk to text models for South African English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa, Xhosa and Malagasy. Finally, Marilene Oliver will present the project Your Data Body which used a range of open access text to speech models to generate voices for anonymous datasets as part of a virtual reality artwork.

• Instructors: Luisa Isidro Herrera, Nicole Marchesseau, and Johann Sander Puustusmaa (York U)

Sound Braid (https://www.soundbraid.org/) is an emergent web platform committed to exploring incommensurable spaces rooted in captured and ongoing sonic experiences that are at least somewhat remote from expressions of human language or music. Braid collaborators—others interested in exploring sonic worlding from diverse perspectives—will be invited to react with previous posters as moments of sound hosted on the braid plait with possible emanations. 

In contrast to the shock and urgency of much of today’s digital life, by opening a gradually self-formulating and non-predictive space, Sound Braid will provide room for thoughtful listening, contemplation, and inquiry into what sound is doing. Participants will be introduced to the Sound Braid platform, and then will be invited to collectively workshop a sonic thread response—or numerous responses—to an existing thread/s. 

The workshop will involve a 15-minute introduction, 30 minutes of practical workshopping and 30 minutes of discussion based on the practical component of the workshop (handheld recording devices or phones can be useful for the practical activity, but are not a requirement).

This is a hybrid session with an option to participate either in-person or online.

• Instructor: Kerry Priest (Independent artist)

Polyphonic poetry is a hybrid form of poetry for many voices. Developed by Kerry Priest, her work on multi-voice poetics recently won a commendation from the National Centre for Writing and the UEA in their New Forms award.

The essence of this new form is polyphony, an ancient and indeed global style of music which treats each voice as an equal. This communality allows for the introduction of competing and complementary narratives; multiple authors, diverse communities, and the representation of the non-human, through a sort of poetry 'dawn chorus'. On a practical level, it allows for the deployment of visual scores, aleatoric techniques and various sorts of improvisation - of text, sound, character, and movement.

In this workshop, participants will be introduced to polyphonic works and given the chance to join in with a couple of group exercises, creating soundscapes according to artistic-conceptual constraints.

Kerry Priest's work has appeared at the Minack Theatre and on radio stations across Europe on the Radia.FM network, especially Soundart Radio who host a Dartington Radiophonic show.

Chair: Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth (U Texas at Austin)

• Panelists: Trent J Wintermeier (U Texas at Austin); Zachary Morrison (U Alberta); Miranda Eastwood (Concordia) and Matt Kilbane (Notre Dame); Rachel Pickard (UBCO)

The SpokenWeb Digital Anthology brings together literary recordings held by SpokenWeb partner institutions and annotated by researchers in the consortium. The anthology will utilize the AudiAnnotate Audiovisual Extensible Workflow (AWE), a cutting-edge workflow and platform for sharing and curating annotations of audiovisual collections created by Dr. Tanya Clement (UT Austin) and Brumfield Labs. By creating the SpokenWeb Digital Anthology through AWE, we demonstrate the anthology form’s capaciousness beyond print culture as it becomes a collaborative and participatory mode of presenting and interacting with recorded artifacts.

This panel will showcase contributions to the SpokenWeb Digital Anthology with participating researchers contextualizing their recordings and annotations historically and culturally and reflecting on digital annotation as an emergent scholarly and archival practice. As a group, we will also discuss the process of creating the anthology and the questions that arose when thinking through the anthology form’s relationship to old and new media.

• Panelists: Mallory Chipman (Independent artist), Yvonne Mullock (Independent artist), John Acorn (U Alberta)

Join artists, researchers, and educators Yvonne Mullock, Mallory Chipman, and John Acorn for a panel discussion on thinking creatively about art practice at the intersection of bioacoustics, zoomusicology, sonic ecology, and research-creation. This conversation is situated within a broader discussion about how activities within the sciences and the humanities can inform and complement each other and produce multivalent projects which engage communities across disciplinary boundaries.

• Instructor: Francisco Berrizbeitia, Tomasz Neugebauer

This workshop will explore the possibilities of Linked Data within the SpokenWeb collections. Linked Data is structured data that is interlinked with other data, in our metadata schema this interlinking occurs on different fields such as location, creator, contributors and most notably on the content’s fields.

The first part of the workshop will be a demonstration of a tool we developed to make such interlinking task easier on the cataloguers, along with some example applications and visualizations produced using a linked data system. In the second part of the session, we will invite participants to join in a discussion about the different possibilities of linked data technology that might be of interest to our community moving forward.

This is a hybrid session with an option to participate either in-person or online.

• Brian Fauteaux (U Alberta), "The Fluidity of Satellite Radio Programming: Online Archives, Pop-up Channels, and Nostalgia in the “Future” of Radio"
• Stacey Copeland (producer, Amplify Podcast Network)
• Laura Vilchis Sanchez (U Alberta), "Lessons from Latin American Community Radio"
• Jennifer Waits (co-founder, Radio Survivor), "Finding College Radio Archives and College Radio Finds"

• Instructor: Stephanie Loveless (sound and media artist)

This participatory workshop will introduce the sounding and listening meditations of composer and sound pioneer Pauline Oliveros. In this workshop, we will explore the difference between passive hearing and active listening, collaborate in group sonic meditations, and develop our own site-responsive scores for listening and sounding. With these activities, we will work towards cultivating attunement to, and agency within, our sonic environment.

• Chair: Jason Camlot (SpokenWeb Director, Concordia Montreal U)

SpokenWeb has accomplished an enormous amount in its four-year existence as a research network. We have developed our own database (Swallow) and the SpokenWeb Metadata Schema for literary audio; digitized, catalogued and described many thousands of archival recordings; studied and written about those recordings in numerous scholarly and creative forms and formats, including over sixty (short and long) episodes of the uniquely collaborative, scholarly SpokenWeb Podcast; we have helped develop and improve tools for the analysis and annotation of spoken audio (AudiAnnotate, Gentle and Drift); created protocols for the legal and ethical use of digital spoken recordings; invented and implemented new ways of teaching with sound in the literature classroom; to name just a few important contributions. Our activities, outputs, and impacts have been substantial. Our priorities were set from the outset of our funded partnership and are reflected by the inter-institutional task forces we have struck over the last four years, to help us accomplish our goals. Beyond our goals in preservation, cataloguing, describing, studying, and mobilizing knowledge about archival recordings, we have engaged in a wide range of related research and development activities. Pretty much everything becomes a research question within our network, and we have been great at framing our work in forms of analysis and explication that benefit the wider scholarly community. 

With all that we have done, and are in the process of still doing, this plenary discussion will serve as a first opportunity for us to begin to imagine and formulate what SpokenWeb as a research network might wish to do in the future. What new and additional research priorities and directions are we interested in thinking about? If we were starting the SpokenWeb partnership today, with the infrastructure, protocols, accessible materials, and dissemination structures we have built already in place, where would we want to focus our attention and energy? What should the primary research axes of SpokenWeb 2025 be?

Facilitated by SpokenWeb Director Jason Camlot, with the participation of SW Governing Board members, this session will generate and structure our initial thoughts in response to such questions. This will be the first of an annual SpokenWeb Futures discussion, which will take place at each of the next three Institutes.

For almost a century, CKUA has been part of Alberta’s story. And as the province has grown, so has the station. From our studios, we keep our listeners connected to the best in arts and culture in Alberta.

CKUA’s headquarters hold all the elements for creating great radio: a cast of colourful characters coming and going; equipment and machinery both cutting-edge and well, old; a library holding over a million songs (as well as all kinds of fascinating historical bits and pieces); a performance space hosting concerts, live broadcasts and a lot more.

Why not come to check it out?

For almost a century, CKUA has been part of Alberta’s story. And as the province has grown, so has the station. From our studios, we keep our listeners connected to the best in arts and culture in Alberta.

CKUA’s headquarters hold all the elements for creating great radio: a cast of colourful characters coming and going; equipment and machinery both cutting-edge and well, old; a library holding over a million songs (as well as all kinds of fascinating historical bits and pieces); a performance space hosting concerts, live broadcasts and a lot more.

Why not come to check it out?