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# Listening with the pandemic |
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“When the sounds of the pandemic recede, how will our hearing be changed?” |
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*Shannon Mattern*[^Mattern] |
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## The pandemic is not an intermission, it's an opportunity |
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The water behind a dam holds an immense amount of potential energy. A crack might become a hole might become a break. If legal regulation, public opinion or under-investment has been the dam holding machine listening back from becoming truly pervasive, then SARS-CoV-2 has weakened that structure throughout. Every voice industry startup and tech juggernaut, every streaming platform, every military funded machine diagnostics lab, every automated care industry device manufacturer has been ready and waiting for just this moment to spring into action with a [quick technological fix](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/15/tech-coronavirus-surveilance-state-digital-disrupt) that just so happens to bolster their position. From the perspective of the machine listening industry, the pandemic is a dream come true. It gets to do what it was always going to anyway, only blanketed now in the twin auras of inevitability and social good. |
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@@ -54,6 +57,7 @@ For such an ambient sensing environment to work, this very environment must be d |
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# Bibliography |
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[^Mattern]: [Shannon Mattern, 'Urban Auscultation; or, Perceiving the Action of the Heart' *Places* (2020)](https://placesjournal.org/article/urban-auscultation-or-perceiving-the-action-of-the-heart/) |
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[^Schuller et al]: LIBRARY, Schuller et al, COVID-19 and Computer Audition: An Overview on What Speech & Sound Analysis Could Contribute in the SARS-CoV-2 Corona Crisis (2020) |
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[^Szendy, Vetter]: LIBRARY, All Ears; The Architecture of Control |
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[^Wark]: LIBRARY, Capitalism is Dead |
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