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Sean Dockray 3 years ago
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@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ Scientifically, machine listening demands enormous volumes of data: exhorted, ex
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. 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.
Moreover, because machine listening is so deeply bound up with logics of automation and pre-emption, it is also recursive. It feeds its listenings back into the world - gendered and gendering, colonial and colonizing, raced and racializing, classed and productive of class relations - as Siri's answer or failure to answer; by alerting the police, denying your claim for asylum, or continuing to play Autechre - and this incites an auditory response to which it listens in turn. The soundscape is increasingly cybernetic. Confronting machine listening means recognising that common-sense distinctions between human and machine simply fail to hold. We are all machine listeners now.
Moreover, because machine listening is so deeply bound up with logics of automation and pre-emption, it is also recursive. It feeds its listenings back into the world - gendered and gendering, colonial and colonizing, ![raced and racializing](soundcite:static/audio/halcyon-siri-imperialism.mp3)[^halcyon_audio_1], classed and productive of class relations - as Siri's answer or failure to answer; by alerting the police, denying your claim for asylum, or continuing to play Autechre - and this incites an auditory response to which it listens in turn. The soundscape is increasingly cybernetic. Confronting machine listening means recognising that common-sense distinctions between human and machine simply fail to hold. We are all machine listeners now.
But machine listening isn't exactly listening either.
@@ -40,4 +40,9 @@ One way of responding to this possibility would be to simply bracket the questio
Another response would be to say that when or if machines listen, they listen "operationally": not in order to understand, or even facilitate human understanding, but to perform an operation: to diagnose, to identify, to recognize, to trigger. And we could notice that as listening becomes increasingly operational sound does too. Operational acoustics: sounds made by machines for machine listeners. Adversarial acoustics: sounds made by machines *against* human listeners, and vice versa.
# Bibliography
# Bibliography
# Footnotes
[^halcyon_audio_1]: Interview with [Halcyon Lawrence](http://www.halcyonlawrence.com/) on August 31, 2020.

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