PhD Candidate, Concordia University

At the HiPSTAS gathering, I am particularly interested in exploring possibilities and tactics for phonocritical practice. Over these last years, with the development of several digital sound archives and repositories – PennSound and SpokenWeb being the two with which I’m most familiar – there has been extended discussion on the archival and pedagogical implications of the phonotext, yet a critical vocabulary to approach the phonotextual object has only begun to be articulated.

I plan to spend my time at HiPSTAS thinking about certain strains of already emerged phonocritical practice and where we might go from here. I am particularly curious about modes of engagement with the phonotextual object outside of poetry and poetics, and so am interested what those in other fields have to offer. Also, in this regard, I am certainly interested in critical writings on phonotextual objects, but, also, I would like to investigate forms of critical practice that are themselves recorded or are technological re-engineerings of phonotexts.

The introduction to the ARLO software enticed me to focus on one particular facet of phonocriticality. The William Carlos Williams – Allen Ginsberg sound-match in the introduction inspired me to think about sounded affinities between poets, a way to rethink concepts of community poetics through sound. I thought that with the ARLO software I might test out the sounded affinities between a number of poets who have a common place of origin or a particular dialect in which the poets were raised. Also, I’d like to look at groups of poets who have a common locale in terms of their community formation, say, as an example the group of poets Michael Davidson discusses in his book about the San Francisco Renaissance and community poetics. Finally, in regards to both of these clusterings, I’m interested in how ARLO may or may not track affinities across gender lines.

There are, too, a few other questions I’d like to attend to with ARLO. As I have a few writings in progress that focus specifically on the ways poets sound their works, I’d like to visualize how a poet’s sound patterns may or may not change across decades, and how that poet’s sounded affinities change or remain the same during that time. Also, following Evans and Filreis, how does ARLO visualize room tone? Finally, as always, I’m interested in imagining ways that practices of close listening in poetry and poetics can extend outside of contexts of poetry and poetics into new spaces of speech and sound studies. In this regard, I’m really looking forward to hearing about what other people at this gathering are working on and the sonic fields they are exploring.