A repository of conversations we’ve had with researchers and artists across the life of the project. These interview transcripts are produced using the Reduct transcription platform. The transcripts contain artefacts and politics of machinic listenings, such as the occasional Miss Herd word, and ah vocalised hesitations and filler sounds.
Bernard Mont-Reynaud is a computer scientist who worked on and around machine listening for more than 50 years before his retirement in 2023. After a PhD at Stanford in the 1970s, he moved to Berkeley, before returning to Stanford’s CCRMA to pursue work on source separation and music. After time at Sony, Audience and several other companies, Mont-Reynaud became Principal Scientist at SoundHound in 2010. We speak to him about his long career in machine listening, including his involvement with the histories of computer music and music intelligence, source separation, auditory scene analysis, and voice assistants.
Interview conducted in December 2022
Mont Reynaud interview edited.mp3
We speak to Santiago about his amazing work on birdsong analysis, acoustic ecology and artificial intelligence, and especially his critical and artistic engagements with Australian magpie archives. Along the way, we discuss biosemiotics, Solomon’s Seal, and how, by starting with magpie calls, you can get to a strong critique of AGI.
We talk with Max about the politics of ‘smart oceans governance’ and the growing application of machine listening to ‘conservation acoustics’. In the process, we also cover his amazing work on ‘military cetology’ and the social construction of whale song, among other things. All this is going to feature in Max’s forthcoming book A Resonant Ecology (Duke UP). If you like this conversation, you might also like Smart Forest Radio, a podcast Max has been involved with, which includes many episodes on digital bioacoustics.
Interview conducted on 7 July 2023
We talk with Beth about her ethnographic work on computational psychiatry, vocal biomarkers, and the automation of care. This means following the AI hype machine into privatised healthcare and the politics of voice. Along the way, we talk about ‘heteromation’, ‘listening like a computer’, and the history of the DSM. We also get stuck into some amazing stories from beth’s fieldwork: including ‘MRI theatre’, the ‘humans in the machine’, and the strange continuities between the ‘grandfather passages’ used by linguists and dadaist poetry.
Interview conducted on 10 October 2022