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@@ -103,7 +103,7 @@ Scientifically, machine listening demands enormous volumes of data: exhorted, ex |
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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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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 - (<span class="soundcite" data-id="893380750" data-start="946000" data-end="1390000" data-plays="1">gendered and gendering</span>),(15.46 - 23.10)[^YS] colonial and colonizing, ,[^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](https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956532/germany-refugee-voice-analysis-dialect-speech-software), 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. We have been becoming machine listeners for a long time. Indeed, the becoming machinic of listening is a foundational concern for any contemporary politics of listening; not because mechanisation itself is a problem, but because it is the condition in which we find ourselves.[^Abu Hamdan] |
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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 - (<span class="soundcite" data-id="893380750" data-start="946000" data-end="1390000" data-plays="1">gendered and gendering</span>),(15.46 - 23.10)[^YS] colonial and colonizing, ,[^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](https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956532/germany-refugee-voice-analysis-dialect-speech-software), 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. We have been becoming machine listeners for a long time. Indeed, the becoming machinic of listening is a foundational concern for any contemporary politics of listening; not because mechanisation *itself* is a problem, but because it is the condition in which we increasingly find ourselves.[^Abu Hamdan] |
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But machine listening isn't exactly listening either. |
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