Update 'content/topic/(against)-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md'

content/topic/(against)-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md

@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ has_experiments: []
 
 ## Alexa, what is machine listening?
 
-"Machine listening" is one common term for a fast-growing interdisciplinary field of science and engineering which uses audio signal processing and machine learning to "make sense" of sound and speech. [^Cella, Serizel, Ellis] Machine listening is what enables you to be "understood" by Siri and Alexa, to Shazam a song, and to interact with many audio-assistive technologies if you are blind or vision impaired [Alper]. As early as the 90s, the term was already being used in computer music to describe the analytic dimension of ['interactive music systems'](https://wp.nyu.edu/robert_rowe/text/interactive-music-systems-1993/chapter5/), whose behavior changes in response to live musical input.[^Rowe, Maier] It was also, of course, a cornerstone of the mass surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013: SPIRITFIRE's "speech-to-text keyword search and paired dialogue transcription"; EViTAP's "automated news monitoring"; VoiceRT's "ingestion", according to one NSA slide, of Iraqi voice data into voiceprints. Domestically, machine listening technologies underpin the vast databases of vocal biometrics now held by many [prison providers](https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/prison-voice-prints-databases-securus/ "Prisons Across the U.S. Are Quietly Building Databases of Incarcerated People’s Voice Prints") and, for instance, the [Australian Tax Office](https://www.computerworld.com/article/3474235/the-ato-now-holds-the-voiceprints-of-one-in-seven-australians.html "The ATO now holds the voiceprints of one in seven Australians"). And they are quickly being integrated into infrastructures of development, security and policing.
+"Machine listening" is one common term for a fast-growing interdisciplinary field of science and engineering which uses audio signal processing and machine learning to "make sense" of sound and speech.[^Cella, Serizel, Ellis] Machine listening is what enables you to be "understood" by Siri and Alexa, to Shazam a song, and to interact with many audio-assistive technologies if you are blind or vision impaired [Alper]. As early as the 90s, the term was already being used in computer music to describe the analytic dimension of ['interactive music systems'](https://wp.nyu.edu/robert_rowe/text/interactive-music-systems-1993/chapter5/), whose behavior changes in response to live musical input.[^Rowe, Maier] It was also, of course, a cornerstone of the mass surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013: SPIRITFIRE's "speech-to-text keyword search and paired dialogue transcription"; EViTAP's "automated news monitoring"; VoiceRT's "ingestion", according to one NSA slide, of Iraqi voice data into voiceprints. Domestically, machine listening technologies underpin the vast databases of vocal biometrics now held by many [prison providers](https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/prison-voice-prints-databases-securus/ "Prisons Across the U.S. Are Quietly Building Databases of Incarcerated People’s Voice Prints") and, for instance, the [Australian Tax Office](https://www.computerworld.com/article/3474235/the-ato-now-holds-the-voiceprints-of-one-in-seven-australians.html "The ATO now holds the voiceprints of one in seven Australians"). And they are quickly being integrated into infrastructures of development, security and policing.
 
 ![Automatic speech recognition](audio:static/audio/kathy-reid-intro-to-ASR.mp3),[^kathy_audio_1] transcription and translation - 
 targeted key word detection {{< nosup >}}[[i](https://theintercept.com/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-recognition-snowden-searchable-text/ "How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text")]{{< /nosup >}} - 
@@ -49,7 +49,7 @@ age determination -
 voice likeability determination - 
 risk assessment {{< nosup >}}[[i](https://www.clearspeed.com/ "Clearspeed: Using the Power of Voice for Good")]...{{< /nosup >}}
 
-These applications are all either currently in use by states, corporations and other entities around the world, or under development. The list is obviously not exhaustive. Nor does it convey the real diversity of markets, cyberphysical and political contexts into which these applications are quickly embedding themselves:
+These applications are all either currently in use by states, corporations and other entities around the world, or under development. The list is obviously not exhaustive. Nor does it convey the real diversity of markets, cyberphysical, social and political contexts into which these applications are quickly embedding themselves:
 
 Digital voice assistants - 
 voice user interfaces - 
@@ -90,20 +90,20 @@ gender vocal training {{< nosup >}}[[i](https://github.com/project-spectra "Proj
 
 As with all forms of machine learning, questions of efficacy, access, privacy, bias, fairness and transparency arise with every use case. But machine listening also demands to be treated as an epistemic and political system in its own right, that increasingly enables, shapes and constrains basic human possibilities, that is making our auditory worlds knowable in new ways, to new institutions, according to new logics, and is remaking (sonic) life in the process. 
 
-Machine listening is much more than just a new scientific discipline or vein of technical innovation then. It is also an emergent field of knowledge-power and cultural production, of data extraction and colonialism, of capital accumulation, automation and control. We must make it a field of political contestation and struggle. If there is to be a world of listening machines, we must ensure it is emancipatory.   
+Machine listening is much more than just a new scientific discipline or vein of technical innovation then. It is also an emergent field of knowledge-power and cultural production, of data extraction and colonialism, of capital accumulation, automation and control. We must make it a field of political contestation and struggle. If there is to be a world of listening machines, we must make it emancipatory.   
 
 
 ## ~~Machine listening~~
 
 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 at point of use, even as it indelibly marks the bodies of workers and permanently scars environments and the atmosphere [Joler interview].
+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 at point of use, even as it indelibly marks the bodies of distant workers and permanently scars ecological systems [Joler interview].
 
-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]. 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 is necessarily a trap [HL excerpt]. 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.
 
-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 [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, 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 now [Abu Hamdan]. And this must be the starting point of any contemporary politics of listening.
+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 [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 [ref Germany/Abu Hamdan], 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]
 
 But machine listening isn't exactly listening either.
 
@@ -121,6 +121,7 @@ Another response would be to say that when or if machines listen, they listen ![
 [^Cella, Serizel, Ellis]: LIBRARY
 [^Rowe, Maier]: LIBRARY; Stefan Maier: [*Machine Listening*](https://technosphere-magazine.hkw.de/p/Machine-Listening-kmgQVZVaQeugBaizQjmZnY), Technosphere Magazine (2018)
 [^intelligent_audio_analysis]: ![](bib:827d1f44-5a35-4278-a527-4df67e5ba321)
+[^Abu Hamdan]: Interview with Lawrence Abu Hamdan
 [^airplanes]: ![](bib:6676af8a-7a4d-4aa8-af96-f26452f58753)
 [^kathy_audio_1]: Interview with [Kathy Reid](https://blog.kathyreid.id.au) on August 11, 2020
 [^andre_audio_1]: Interview with [André Dao](https://andredao.com/) on September 4, 2020