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@@ -96,13 +96,13 @@ Machine listening is much more than just a new scientific discipline or vein of |
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Machine listening isn't just machinic. |
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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  at point of use, even as it indelibly marks the bodies of distant workers and permanently scars ecological systems. |
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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  at point of use, even as it indelibly marks the bodies of distant workers and permanently scars ecological systems. |
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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 .[^halcyon_audio_1] It means committing to the very system that is oppressing or occluding you: a "techno-politics of perfection."[^Goldenfein] |
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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 - /Yolande%20Strengers%20and%20Jenny%20Ken%20-%20Yolande%20Strengers,%20Jenny%20Kenned.mp3|952000|1390000),[^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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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 - ,[^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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