Merge branch 'master' of http://git.metadada.xyz/machinelistening/curriculum-test

PUBLISH.trigger.md

@@ -11,6 +11,6 @@ Don't forget to click on "Commit Changes" to commit the changes.
 ```
 _ _ _ New changes after this _ _ _
 
-sean 12
+sean 123
 joel 1
-james 5
+james 8.2

content/curriculum/index.md

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ---
 title: "Machine Listening"
-has_topics: ["against-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md", "lessons-in-how-not-to-be-heard.md", "listening-with-the-pandemic.md", "massive-device-orchestration.md"]
+has_topics: ["(against)-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md", "lessons-in-how-(not)-to-be-heard.md", "listening-with-the-pandemic.md", "massive-device-orchestration.md"]
 ---
 
 # Machine Listening, a curriculum
@@ -9,12 +9,11 @@ Our devices are listening to us. Previous generations of audio-technology transm
 
 MACHINE LISTENING is a new investigation and experiment in collective learning, curated by [James Parker](https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/artists/james-parker), [Joel Stern](https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/artists/joel-stern) and [Sean Dockray](https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/artists/sean-dockray) for [Liquid Architecture](http://liquidarchitecture.org.au/ "Liquid Architecture") and launched at [Unsound 2020: Intermission](https://www.unsound.pl/en/intermission "Unsound") 
 
-Across three days at the start of October, we will come together to investigate the implications of the coming world of listening machines in both its dystopian and utopian dimensions. Comprising conversations, performance, provocations and writing from contributors around the
-world, the online gatherings are divided into three sections, open to all:
+Across three days at the start of October, we will come together to investigate the implications of the coming world of listening machines in both its dystopian and utopian dimensions. Comprising conversations, performance, provocations and writing from contributors around the world, the online gatherings are divided into three sections, open to all:
 
-2nd October – *![](topic:against-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md)*
+2nd October – *![](topic:(against)-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md)*
 
-3rd October – *![](topic:lessons-in-how-not-to-be-heard.md)*
+3rd October – *![](topic:lessons-in-how-(not)-to-be-heard.md)*
 
 4th October – *![](topic:listening-with-the-pandemic.md)*
 

content/topic/against-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md → 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 [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. This must become the starting point of a 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, 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.
 
 But machine listening isn't exactly listening either.
 

content/topic/lessons-in-how-not-to-be-heard.md → content/topic/lessons-in-how-(not)-to-be-heard.md

@@ -1,8 +1,8 @@
 ---
-title: "Lessons in how not to be heard"
+title: "Lessons in how (not) to be heard"
 has_experiments: []
 ---
-# Lessons in how not to be heard
+# Lessons in how (not) to be heard
 
 This is not a manifesto. It is the first draft of an open curriculum, conceived, drafted and delivered online, during a global pandemic, and launched at Unsound, a festival of music and arts. It is an experiment in collaborative study and collective learning at a time when education and the arts feel more precarious than ever; which is saying something. A curriculum is also a technology, a tool for supporting and activating learning. And this one is open source. In addition to texts like this, it gathers new artworks alongside existing writing and resources on machine listening, as well as a growing series of interviews with artists, thinkers, activists and developers working in the area. Its home, for now, is machinelistening.exposed, where it is built on a platform developed by Pirate Care for their own experiments in open pedagogy [ref]. We encourage everyone to use all this however they see fit, and in doing so to freely adapt, rework and expand it to reflect their own experience and serve their own pedagogies. 
 
@@ -12,23 +12,23 @@ But we also don't want to foreclose more utopian possibilities: to rule out in a
 
 So, with apologies to Hito Steyerl [ref], some lessons...
 
-## Lesson 1: How to become inaudible by disabling silicon ears
+## Lesson 1: How to become (in)audible by disabling silicon ears
 
 With difficulty; name machine listening as an object of political contestation and struggle; describe some of its features, as they are clarified by the pandemic; become an artist becoming a paradigm dissident; dismantle capitalism and abolish big data, since they are increasingly difficult to disentangle; produce a diverse counterculture of machine listening; demonstrate and mock machine listening in its thoughtlessness; demonstrate and mock the machine listening industry in its thoughtlessness; write a policy document, but with artists as well as lawyers; destroy the data centres; fuck the algorithm.
 
-## Lesson 2: How to be inaudible in the presence of microphones
+## Lesson 2: How to be (in)audible in the presence of microphones
 
 Tear them down or rip them out; be somewhere loud; mask your speech with noise; jam signals; invent the privacy industry; never use a telephone, or a smart speaker, or a car, or a city; ask Siri; cover your laptop with sticky tape; have a speech disorder; write a manifesto on audio luddism; invent new languages; autotune everything; be female and over 50, or indigenous; speak Wiradjuri.
 
-## Lesson 3: How to make yourself inaudible by being out of earshot
+## Lesson 3: How to make yourself (in)audible by being out of earshot
 
 Be very quiet; refuse to attend the teleconference; live in the right neighbourhood; be a member of a group that machine listeners don't care about; be a member of a group they care about a lot; use encrypted audio; spend the evening doomscrolling the machine listening apocalypse.
 
-## Lesson 4: How to become inaudible by merging into a world of operational sound
+## Lesson 4: How to become (in)audible by merging into a world of operational sound
 
 Speak in code; become the code you speak; entitle your next album Adversarial Music Synthesizer (Threat Model); embed subliminal messages in it, but for Alexa; get an Amazon Halo for Christmas; get your cough medicine delivered the day before you start coughing; allow machine listening's attempted perfection of the subject to extinguish the subject.  
 
-## Lesson 5: How to be inaudible by having nothing to hide
+## Lesson 5: How to be (in)audible by having nothing to hide
 
 Enjoy being listened to; get your coronavirus diagnosis over the phone; get your coronavirus diagnosis without asking to be tested; let google book your haircut for you; ask your voice assistant for advice about your polyamorous relationship; listen to "ambient music for reading" on your smart headphones, forever; become an evangelist of technosolutionism; allow yourself to be convinced that the main problem is privacy; petition the court for access to your partner's Alexa archive; enjoy extraordinary rendition and extrajudicial drone killings; enjoy being unable to get a loan or access state services and not knowing why.
 

content/topic/listening-with-the-pandemic.md

@@ -6,6 +6,9 @@ has_experiments: ["living-with-a-black-box.md"]
 
 # Listening with the pandemic
 
+>“When the sounds of the pandemic recede, how will our hearing be changed?” 
+<br/>*Shannon Mattern*[^Mattern] 
+
 ## The pandemic is not an intermission, it's an opportunity
 
 The water behind a dam holds an immense amount of potential energy. A crack might become a hole might become a break. If legal regulation, public opinion or under-investment has been the dam holding machine listening back from becoming truly pervasive, then SARS-CoV-2 has weakened that structure throughout. Every voice industry startup and tech juggernaut, every streaming platform, every military funded machine diagnostics lab, every automated care industry device manufacturer has been ready and waiting for just this moment to spring into action with a [quick technological fix](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/15/tech-coronavirus-surveilance-state-digital-disrupt) that just so happens to bolster their position. From the perspective of the machine listening industry, the pandemic is a dream come true. It gets to do what it was always going to anyway, only blanketed now in the twin auras of inevitability and social good. 
@@ -24,7 +27,7 @@ There is a profound and ramifying "thoughtlessness" here: at once ethical, polit
 
 ## Touchlessness
 
-Most of us will experience machine listening as an interface. Say goodbye to spring-mounted keys and clicking mice, maybe soon even the quiet tap of fingers on capacitive glass. "Alexa," we command - or is it ask? - into an airy, expectant atmosphere. ![Touchlessness](audio:static/audio/andrejevic-on-touchlessness.mp3)[^andrejevic] refers first to this invisibility of interface, but it is also "social distancing", remote work, standing no less than 2m apart in a queue for toilet paper, and, in the case of corona voice diagnostics, the idea that computational systems might determine the presence of the virus from the sound of a person's speech or cough. 
+Most of us will experience machine listening as an interface. Say goodbye to spring-mounted keys and clicking mice, maybe soon even the quiet tap of fingers on capacitive glass. "Alexa," we command - or is it ask? - into an airy, expectant atmosphere. ![Touchlessness](audio:static/audio/andrejevic-on-touchlessness.mp3)[^andrejevic] refers first to this invisibility of interface, but it is also "social distancing", remote work, standing no less than 2m apart in a queue for toilet paper, and, in the case of corona voice diagnostics, the idea that computational systems might determine the presence of the virus from the sound of a person's speech or cough. SOMETHING ON THE STETHOSCOPE / MEDIATE AUSCULTATION
 
 There's no evidence yet that such a thing is possible, but many organisations are trying and they are thirsty for data {{< nosup >}}[[i](https://voca.ai/corona-virus/ "Voca.ai and Carnegie Mellon University partner to enable fast diagnosis of COVID-19"), [ii](https://covid-19-sounds.org/en/ "COVID-19 Sounds App"), [iii](https://news.mit.edu/2020/signs-covid-19-may-be-hidden-speech-signals-0708 "Signs of Covid-19 may be hidden in speech signals"), [iv](https://coughvid.epfl.ch/ "Send us a recording of a cough sound and help research on COVID-19"), [v](https://www.voiceome.org/covid19/index.html "Use Voice to Fight COVID-19"), [vi](https://futurism.com/neoscope/app-claims-covid19-voice "This App Claims It Can Hear COVID-19 in Your Voice"), [vii](https://www.soniphi.com/ "Soniphi is developing a screening solution for COVID-19 that uses your voice.  If you have recently tested positive we need your help")]{{< /nosup >}}. {{< nosup >}}["Donate your voice."](https://www.voiceome.org/covid19/index.html){{< /nosup >}} "Hit record and read the following sentences while pinching your nose." "Press record and cough three times." 
 
@@ -54,6 +57,7 @@ For such an ambient sensing environment to work, this very environment must be d
 
 # Bibliography
 
+[^Mattern]: Shannon Mattern, ['Urban Auscultation; or, Perceiving the Action of the Heart' *Places* (2020)](https://placesjournal.org/article/urban-auscultation-or-perceiving-the-action-of-the-heart/)
 [^Schuller et al]: LIBRARY, Schuller et al, COVID-19 and Computer Audition: An Overview on What Speech & Sound Analysis Could Contribute in the SARS-CoV-2 Corona Crisis (2020)
 [^Szendy, Vetter]: LIBRARY, All Ears; The Architecture of Control
 [^Wark]: LIBRARY, Capitalism is Dead