minor edits by James Parker. time stamps reflect unedited recording, so are a little off throughout.

[00:00:20] James Parker: All right. Thanks so much for joining us, Max. Yeah, would you like to maybe kick off by just introducing yourself, however feels right to you? Sure.

[00:00:32] Max Ritts: Well, I am a geographer. I'm a first year professor. Just finished my first year at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. But I guess I really consider myself a person who works and thinks along the North Coast of British Columbia most of all. So that's the sort of context in which I approach issues of sound and sound studies and also the other things that shape the work I do, like indigenous politics and political ecology.

[00:01:02] James Parker: What's your disciplinary background? Oh, yeah? OK. What's your disciplinary background? Because what you've just described there is kind of pretty sound studies. Is it or isn't it a discipline? But perhaps you have a training or something that's relevant.

[00:01:33] Max Ritts: Sure. My background is geography. I consider myself an environmental geographer, most of all, I guess, although I definitely have other interests and passions and areas of curiosity.

[00:01:47] Max Ritts: I'd also say that I was lucky to have some really wonderful advisors in the world of sound studies, including Jonathan Stern, who was a committee member, and also a guy named Jeff Mann, who is known more as a political economist but wrote a really wonderful piece on country music back in 2008, which really introduced me to some of the ideas that I would then work into my own kind of project of geography around ideology and sound and power and even capitalism and the way that those issues manifest as acoustic issues. But yeah, geography is my field.

[00:02:19] James Parker: The first piece of yours I came across was called Military Cetology, a piece you wrote with John Shiga. And you've got work on the social construction of Wales song and then obviously more recent work that's to do with digital bioacoustics and various other topics. So it's a pretty broad palette. Could you describe some of the topics you've worked on? I mean, I've mentioned a couple. You said British Columbia, but what's the sort of umbrella view, the broad overview of what you've worked on previously? Because I know you've got a book coming out.

[00:02:59] James Parker: Are these all going to feed into a book? How does the story kind of hold together, I guess I'm wondering, beyond geography, beyond sound studies?

[00:03:10] Max Ritts: Yeah, it's a good question. And I guess that's why I also introduced myself with respect to this part of the world that has really shaped my training and my interests. Because the North Coast has been a space that I've worked through in relation to a number of different kind of sonic problems, I guess you could call them. Wales song being one of them, ocean noise being another, but also music, also indigenous popular music and acoustic ecologies and its legacy, and smart technologies and smart oceans, which I'm sure we're going to talk about.

[00:03:47] Max Ritts: Each of them in different ways beyond that region. But the region has kind of maintained this kind of cohering effect in the sense that these different topics that I've studied in the world of sound studies and geography all kind of related to my initial time in this part of the world, where I struggled, and I'm still struggling in some ways, to kind of see the connections.

[00:04:07] Max Ritts: But that's really what the book that I'm working on is about too, is sort of seeing in this diversity of different kinds of sonic cultures some underlying questions and underlying problems that give those things meaning in that part of the world. I've written about bioacoustics, and I've written about calving glaciers and aesthetic forays into listening to ice.

[00:04:28] Max Ritts: And I have a piece coming out around urban sustainability politics, which initially had a whole bit on surveillance actually, eavesdropping, which we kind of had to unfortunately remove from the final draft.

[00:04:38] Max Ritts: But all these topics kind of came out, again, of this very different part of the world, even though they've taken place in places like Denmark and the Beaufort Sea, which is a bit of an idiosyncratic way to do geography, but I guess it maintains that idea of situated knowledges and place-based research and just ways of thinking problems through the articulation of different spaces in question.

[00:05:04] James Parker: Do you have a title for the book?

[00:05:08] Max Ritts: I do. Yeah. It's called A Resonant Ecology.

[00:05:13] James Parker: OK. So it's an ecology is kind of going to be the, you know, the thing that holds it together.

[00:05:21] Max Ritts: Yeah, well, I can get into it right now if you want. I mean, but the the reason, the initial reason I called the book a resonant ecology is because I was thinking through some problems around the term resonance, which comes up a lot in in sound studies, and also in kind of eco theoretical discussion involving sound.

[00:05:40] Max Ritts: And I was unnerved by the way in which resonance was almost uniformly being described as a kind of positive trajectory or valence like it was a good thing to achieve resonance, when at the same time, we noticed that, you know, big data and IBM acoustic program and Microsoft and Google are also very interested in, you know, the relations of sound and space for very different purposes than, you know, democratic futures.

[00:06:04] Max Ritts: And the way in which discourses of resonance appear in Silicon Valley and in big tech in general, and you can look at auto charmers work on resonance, for example, as an example of this, this kind of moving into that space, made me realize that the term is much more better conceived as a kind of uncertain site of social mediation of sound rather than as this uniformly positive thing.