From d40a014ff1bdbe22d39c8094b9833606ab9bd683 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Sean Dockray Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2020 15:28:12 +1000 Subject: [PATCH] using new audio samples --- .../topic/(against)-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md | 4 ++-- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) 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 3c04fc0..39b0301 100644 --- a/content/topic/(against)-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md +++ b/content/topic/(against)-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md @@ -96,13 +96,13 @@ Machine listening is much more than just a new scientific discipline or vein of 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](Joler_anatomy) at point of use, even as it indelibly marks the bodies of distant workers and permanently scars ecological systems. +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](audio:static/audio/vladan.mp3) at point of use, even as it indelibly marks the bodies of distant workers and permanently scars ecological systems. 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 can also be ![a trap](audio:static/audio/lawrence_trap.mp3).[^halcyon_audio_1] 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](audio:https://machinelistening.exposed/library/Yolande%20Strengers,%20Jenny%20Kennedy,%20Ja/Yolande%20Strengers%20and%20Jenny%20Kennedy%20(10)/Yolande%20Strengers%20and%20Jenny%20Ken%20-%20Yolande%20Strengers,%20Jenny%20Kenned.mp3|952000|1390000),[^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] +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](audio:static/audio/gender-and-gendering.mp3),[^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.