diff --git a/content/topic/(against)-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md b/content/topic/(against)-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md index e3ff8db..53e3227 100644 --- a/content/topic/(against)-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md +++ b/content/topic/(against)-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md @@ -103,7 +103,7 @@ 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.[^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. -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),(15.46 - 23.10)[^YS] colonial and colonizing, ![raced and racializing](audio: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](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] +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),(15.46 - 23.10)[^YS] colonial and colonizing, ![raced and racializing](audio: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](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] But machine listening isn't exactly listening either.