Temple University Press Journals
Not a member yet
549 research outputs found
Sort by
The Acousmatic Question and the Will to Datafy: Otter.ai, Low-Resource Languages, and the Politics of Machine Listening
No full textWhat happens when Nina Eidsheim’s acousmatic question—“Who is this?”—is delegated to machines? Machine listening processes turn sound and voices into data. This article explores the political stakes that accompany the automated extraction, processing, and analysis of human voices in machine listening, specifically speech recognition. While machine listening is promoted to users in the name of utility, inclusiveness, and access, it also serves corporate purposes: the expropriation and ownership of massive collections of data. This extractive will to datafy subtends commercial and state-based machine listening operations. We outline this problematic process though two case studies: the datafication of “low-resource” languages for speech recognition in India and the widespread adoption of Otter.ai transcription services in Canada and the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. In both cases, noble aims—inclusion and access—are simultaneously coopted to serve corporations’ extractive projects, which are built on denying speakers the right to their own voices
Exceeding the Visual, Eluding the Textual
No full textI hope this playful(l) playlet can exemplify the rigorous fun that practice-based research can encourage. My affinity with Eidsheim’s influential text is profound; I recognize in it multiple points of alliance with the aims of anthropology (at its best), and of critical cultural studies/postcolonial and decolonial theory. It has been my own lifelong quest to destabilize conventional categories, particularly the Master Subject, “the self” and essentialized “identity,” and the many variations on this theme: the human, the body, the subject/world binary, the theory/practice binary, and now—the voice and timbre
“Buffalo Soldiers . . . It’s Time to Refuse to Ride”: Indigenous Resistance, Third World Radicalism, and Tyree Scott’s Black Radical Political Education
No full textThis paper examines the multiracial coalition politics of Tyree Scott, one of Seattle’s preeminent Black radicals during the 1970s. A former construction contractor who became a community organizer in the late 1960s, Scott blossomed into one of the most vocal proponents of Third World solidarity in Seattle from the 1970s until his untimely death in 2003. By drawing on an archival collection of materials left by Scott including letters, reports, essays, and speeches, I unpack an analogue that he continually referenced throughout his long life as an activist: the “New Buffalo Soldier.” In Scott’s writings, he presented activists of color who neglected the plight of other aggrieved racial groups as yet another manifestation of Black soldiers who fought on the side of Manifest Destiny in the 1800s. To give further context to Scott’s analysis, this article pays particular attention to his interactions with Indigenous activists in the Pacific Northwest, as well as members of the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC). Moreover, it situates Scott’s analysis of past and present Buffalo Soldiers as a critical element of his local organizing, which, by the mid-1970s, sought to link struggles against institutionalized racism in the Seattle construction industry, the legal repression of local activists, and Third World decolonization. While critiques of settler colonialism remain an understudied aspect of the history of Black radicalism, this article shows that at least for Scott, political education around settler colonialism played a critical role in shaping a radical coalition politics
Listening Practice and History: Sound, Erasure
No full textIn narrating the musical life of Chinese immigrants in the United States of the nineteenth century, one of the most difficult challenges is its sound. The sound did not exist. Presumably, one could trace the sound through a careful study of the performing history of Cantonese opera, the popular genre that enchanted Chinese immigrants, the majority of whom came from the Pearl River Delta of southern China. Chinese theaters performing Cantonese opera proliferated in cities and mining and railroad towns throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, with four concurrent Chinese theaters in San Francisco by the end of the 1870s. However, Cantonese opera went through significant changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leaving limited sources for scholars to fully grasp the performance practice and repertoire of the nineteenth century. Although books of lyrics of classic verses and scripts of traditional Cantonese opera exist, their relation to the performance practices of this period, which also relied heavily on improvisation, remains little known. Lacking historical sources of the opera genre is not, however, the primary problem. Erasure is
Do Vibrations Make Decisions?
No full textI have tremendous admiration for Nina Sun Eidsheim’s thinking because it is as unconventional as it is rigorous and ethically committed. Her two monographs, Sensing Sound and The Race of Sound, present their ideas with intensity and grace. They overflow with remarkable case studies that remain with the reader long after the pages have been read; they bring together the worlds of popular music and classical music—and of the avant-garde, the popular, and the elite—around the focal point of the voice; they model the fusion of music criticism with critical practice; and they are framed by an original, challenging philosophical vision. The two texts, taken together, form one of those often-talked-about yet not-often-encountered wholes that is greater than the sum of its parts.
That whole is a nothing less than a systematic philosophy of music, sound, and being that I refer to here as a vibrational monism. Every time I have taught Eidsheim’s work in seminar, I find myself drawn to thinking about this whole, even as I find others around the table often attending to more closely to individual case studies. I am uncertain whether my own predilection for philosophy is what guides my attention toward the whole, but undoubtedly it is the matrix from which spring the series of questions that I pose
A Different Way of Working: The Insurgent Sociology of Shana M. griffin
No full textThrough her art, education, and activism, Shana M. griffin addresses issues that matter. Her projects and publications call attention to racialized sexism and segregation, to poverty and predatory policing, to housing insecurity and homophobia. They illuminate as well, however, the profound wisdom, creativity, and consciousness of generations of Black women whose refusals of unlivable destinies have enabled Black people to survive and even thrive in the face of calculated white supremacist cruelty and contempt. Yet even more important than the matter of her oeuvre is the manner by which it is conducted. From her standpoint at the intersections of art and activism, of scholarship and social struggle, griffin has formulated new ways of working that are well worthy of emulation by others. She creates works of art that are not designed for connoisseurship or collection but instead seek to shake up social relations and imbue people with the potential to work collaboratively and collegially, to recognize the value of undervalued people, and to fight back against the ways in which racism, sexism, homophobia, and other oppressive practices harm everyone by treating difference as an excuse for domination
Unsettling Complicities: An Autoethnographic Mapping
No full textIn my article “Mapping Complicities in Brahmin Supremacy to White Supremacy: An Unsettling of South Asia and South Asian America” (earlier in this issue of Kalfou) I mapped the pillars of brahmin and white supremacy. Please read that article first, as it provides the context for the writing of this article. In this rumination, I use autoethnographic accounting to un/map and un/settle complicities by tracing investments and continuities in the ideological pillars upholding brahmin and white supremacy
Hearing Timbre at the Crossroads
No full textI recently taught a graduate music seminar titled “Timbre at the Crossroads,” which focused on how the idea of timbre has been constructed across disciplinary frames, in various times and places, by many different actors. A grounding premise was that timbre is best understood as a relational entity, a name placed on a set of sonic parameters, the bounds of which lack clear consensus and are constantly being negotiated. Listening in multiple directions, we engaged with a wealth of cross-disciplinary scholarship that has come to define the contemporary field of timbre studies, including sources from music theory, (ethno)musicology, composition, psychoacoustics, history, linguistics, sociology, and science and technology studies. Likewise, we moved freely between time scales, making macro-historical connections between eighteenth-century organological treatises and twenty-first-century assisted-orchestration software, while also tuning into the micro-temporal aspects of timbre as a multidimensional aspect of sound and musical expression. This broad spectrum of methodologies revealed the extent to which timbre is entangled with a vast range of epistemic instruments, cultural practices, and listening techniques, yielding numerous, often incongruent, answers to even the most basic of questions: what is timbre? Against this backdrop, Nina Sun Eidsheim’s book The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (2019) makes a significant contribution to timbre studies by undertaking a critical examination of timbre, race, and identity
My Brother’s Words: A Conversation with Robert “Faruq” Wideman
No full textRobert “Faruq” Wideman is the formerly incarcerated younger brother of the African American author John Edgar Wideman. The first published in-depth interview since Faruq’s release in 2019 after forty-four years in prison, this piece speaks to Kalfou’s interest in the theme of “insubordinate space.” John and Faruq’s relationship itself, the subject of one of John’s best-known books, Brothers and Keepers (1984), is the very definition of the journal’s intent to “connect the specialized knowledge produced in academe to the situated knowledge generated in aggrieved communities.” Beyond that, Wideman’s writing is unthinkable without his connection with Faruq; the radical contrast between their fates is arguably the underpinning interest of his work.
The interview connects Faruq’s life experience, at the hardest end of the U.S. justice system, to some of the key themes from his brother’s work. The discussion offers a window onto what rehabilitation can look like during a lifetime spent in the prison system, and the interpersonal processes that can assist a person’s reform. Considered here are the complexities of the role of Faruq’s voice in Brothers and Keepers, and the intense pressures on him of growing up young, gifted, and Black but in the shadow of his older siblings. We gain important insights into Faruq’s work as a mathematician, a teacher, and a mentor, and he also offers some new perspectives on his brother’s writing and its representation of their family relationships and especially their father. Faruq offers insights into his experiences of the Black Power movement, literary celebrity, and the abuse of his human rights while in jail; he speaks about his meditation practice and the power of learning stillness for creating a change in his life. The interview concludes with Faruq’s electrifying story of the commutation of his sentence
