Slow Listening: How to Study Audio Recordings as Vocal Performance

This workshop will introduce Slow Listening methods and an extremely user friendly, state-of-the-art, open-source tool, called Drift, for the purpose of studying audio recordings of speech as performance. Such recordings can range from poetry readings to podcasts, stand-up comedy to audio books, radio drama to political speeches. Drift, available at https://drift4.spokenweb.ca/, was developed over the last decade, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the U.S. and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It allows artists and humanities scholars, with no background in linguistics or signal processing, to easily upload audio or video files and visualize and analyze aspects of speech as performance. Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop and share a short audio or video clip of interest.

Marit MacArthur teaches writing, and occasionally performance studies, at the University of California, Davis. Her collaborative, interdisciplinary research in digital voice studies and Slow Listening has been published in PMLA, Digital Humanities Quarterly, the Journal of Cultural Analytics, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sounding Out!, Stanford’s ARCADE Colloquy, The Paris Review Online, Jacket2 and Literature in the Digital Age. Her recent work on AI and writing has appeared in Frontiers in Communication, Computers and Composition, AI & Society, Inside Higher Ed, and Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, and is forthcoming in Bad Ideas about AI and Writing. She is series editor for the journal Critical AI on the topic of generative AI and writing in higher education. Her full profile is available here: https://writingcenter.ucdavis.edu/people/marit-macarthur

Location:

Bancroft 1.01 on QMUL’s Mile End campus: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/about/howtofindus/mileend/

This event is open to all and free to attend but please register in advance.

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Host or Publisher School of the Arts