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@@ -98,7 +98,7 @@ Machine listening isn't just machinic.

Materially, it entails enormous exploitation of both human and planetary resources: to build, power and maintain the vast infrastructures on which it depends, along with all the microphones and algorithms which are its [most visible manifestations](https://anatomyof.ai/ "Anatomy of an AI System").[^Crawford and Joler] Even these are not so visible however. One of the many political challenges machine listening presents is its tendency to ![disappear](Joler_anatomy) at point of use, even as it indelibly marks the bodies of distant workers and permanently scars ecological systems.

Scientifically, machine listening demands enormous volumes of data: exhorted, extracted and appropriated from auditory environments and cultures which, though numerous already, will never be diverse enough. This is why responding to machinic bias with a politics of inclusion is necessarily a trap [HL excerpt: 40.55-44.35]. It means committing to the very system that is oppressing or occluding you: a "techno-politics of perfection."[^Goldenfein]
Scientifically, machine listening demands enormous volumes of data: exhorted, extracted and appropriated from auditory environments and cultures which, though numerous already, will never be diverse enough. This is why responding to machinic bias with a politics of inclusion can also be ![a trap](audio:static/audio/lawrence_trap.mp3).[^halcyon_audio_1] It means committing to the very system that is oppressing or occluding you: a "techno-politics of perfection."[^Goldenfein]

Because machine listening is trained on (more-than) human auditory worlds, it inevitably encodes, invisibilises and reinscribes normative listenings, along with a range of more arbitrary artifacts of the datasets, statistical models and computational systems which are at once its lifeblood and fundamentally opaque.[^McQuillan] This combination means that machine listening is simultaneously an alibi or front for the proliferation and normalisation of specific auditory practices *as* machinic, and, conversely, often irreducible to human apprehension; which is to say the worst of both worlds.



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