Audio and Ideas: Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting, Panel #1

Summary

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Audio and Ideas: Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting, Panel #1

New Books Network | June 17, 2026

Main Theme:
This panel explores the intersection of podcasting and scholarly research, focusing on how original academic work can be created and communicated more widely through narrative audio formats. It features deep dives into two innovative scholar-podcast collaborations: Maura Mills' Tuning Time (on time-stretching and audio history) and Fanny Grabinski’s The Elephant in the Piano (on the material history and ecology of the piano).

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Episode Structure & Key Discussions

1. Introduction: The Academic Podcasting Premise

Timestamps: [00:01]–[06:43]

• Moderator & Robert Boynton set the stage, emphasizing the goal of moving beyond simple academic “chat” to create narrative, idea-driven scholarly podcasts.
• Quote: “Chat can be great, but it should be the floor, not the ceiling, for what we do.” (Moderator, [02:47])
• Universities are framed as knowledge sanctuaries, positioned to innovate in narrative podcasting as the commercial audio market faces challenges.
• Context: The conference aims to bridge the divide between journalism/audio professionals and academic researchers.

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2. Tuning Time: Podcast as Scholarly Collaboration

[06:43]–[31:42]

Project Genesis & Motivation

• Benjamin Walker explains moving from major documentary projects to collaborating with academics, inspired by the deep timeframe available to scholars for research.
• The Tuning Time podcast is rooted in creating “original scholarship as podcast.”

Episode Clip: The History & Politics of Time-Stretching

• Maura Mills narrates the origins of time-stretching technology, connecting it to both disability/accessibility (blind users of audio books) and experimental music.
• Collaboration with the late Jonathan Stern is foregrounded—highlighting the merging of historical, scientific, and cultural analysis.

Notable Moments

• On Academic Collaboration:
  “To create an academic podcast is to enter into a collaborative research relationship with an audio producer. Co-research is a really intense entanglement.”
  —Maura Mills ([17:34])
• Podcasting demands Mills rework both her and her late co-author’s material, often guided by the audio producer’s narrative instincts.
• Process Insight:
  Mills describes podcasting as a “cinematographic” process—akin to being “directed” as an actor, with constant script revisions and a heightened focus on voice, pacing, and example selection.

The Research as Performance

• Creating the podcast meant new research avenues, elevating “footnotes” (i.e., citations) into interview subjects and living voices.

• Quote:
  “Our currency is... being cited... And so having certain scholars actually tell this bigger story about their insights... does justice to that scholarship.”
  —Maura Mills ([25:07])

• The podcast amplifies historically marginalized voices, especially blind innovators in sound technology and users whose contributions have been overlooked.

Evolving the Project with Audio Producers

• Benjamin Walker describes becoming a co-researcher, discovering archival material overlooked by Mills, and prompting new interview and narrative directions.
• “You have a sense of voice that is very different from mine... I think of myself as working on the voice, but it's mostly through print...”
  —Maura Mills ([28:30])

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3. The Elephant in the Piano: Material, Ecology, and Sound

[31:49]–[47:59]

Project Overview

• Fanny Grabinski introduces her monograph-in-progress, The Elephant in the Piano, and its podcast spinoff, which explores the environmental and social history behind piano materials (wood, ivory, metal, felt).

Research in Sound and Place

• Field recordings supplement archival research; the podcast houses emotional and embodied perspectives that don’t easily fit into print scholarship.
• Interview clips illustrate material qualities—e.g., the “stiffness to weight ratio” of spruce in piano soundboards ([36:24]), and the environmental/colonial legacy of ivory via song and oral history ([41:10]).
• Quote–Power of Audio:
  “How do you go about including something like this in a book? ...the podcast is a medium particularly well suited to telling material histories.”
  —Fanny Grabinski ([42:24])

Podcasting as Expanding Academic Method

• The podcast format multiplies voices and perspectives, turning footnotes into living “cast members.”
• On Citation:
  “We're... casting characters... it's not just me... It's very much a collaborative way of writing. And... it felt like a very fair way of giving credit.”
  —Fanny Grabinski ([43:25])
• Audio allows rich juxtapositions—mixing music, field interviews, and various times/places—while highlighting the emotional resonance of archival sounds.

Innovative Scholarly Practice

• The research-team’s pursuit of sound archives and music as narrative devices is foregrounded:
  “We've been systematically prioritizing that [music] in our research... to cultivate kind of a layered listening to all the musics and sounds that are tucked in a piano.”
  —Fanny Grabinski ([46:07])

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4. Reflections: Audience, Academic Skepticism, and Disciplinary Boundaries

[47:59]–[60:28]

On Audience

• Podcasts target both specialized (academics, grad students, enthusiasts) and potentially wider audiences, but “general” appeal is secondary to scholarly depth.
• Quote:
  “If you told us to make a popular podcast, we would have to admit we can’t do that. But... for sound studies or the musicology group, I think we can hit that audience.”
  —Benjamin Walker ([50:37])
• Accessibility initiatives (especially for blind audiences) and methods classes are cited as important potential listeners.

On Skepticism and the Value for Academia

• Academic pushback is low in fields like sound studies and media studies, in part due to interdisciplinarity and openness to experimentation—podcasting is seen as an extension of research practice.
• Podcasting is described as creating an "archive" for future listeners and researchers.
• Departmental Innovation:
  “We had the first dissertation defended as a podcast in our department.”
  —Fanny Grabinski ([57:29])

Application Beyond Sound Studies

• Abstract and theoretical fields (e.g., philosophy, political theory) can be translated into audio by focusing on topical conversations, contemporary relevance, and careful narrative design.
• “You could do a historical narrative and connect that to these very big questions that we’re grappling with today.”
  —Benjamin Walker ([58:54])

Importance of Collaboration and Future Expansion

• The panelists emphasize the centrality of collaboration, flexibility in methods, and being open to new discoveries prompted by the audio format.
• There is optimism about expanding scholarly podcasting beyond sound-centric disciplines.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

On the Unique Power of the Medium

• “Podcasting and audio are such powerful mediums, it would be a shame if it were reduced to chat and discussion... it should be the floor, not the ceiling...”
  —Moderator ([02:47])

On Emotional & Interpersonal Dimensions

• “Jonathan was really one of my best friends... the timing of you knocking on the door of my office last spring was so fortuitous...”
  —Maura Mills ([17:34])

On Collaboration & Intellectual Growth

• “It’s forced both of us to do research, to finish telling some of the stories that I didn’t think were going to become stories.”
  —Maura Mills ([22:04])

On Transformation of Citations

• “The citation... is a footnote. And so having certain scholars actually tell this bigger story... does justice to that scholarship...”
  —Maura Mills ([25:07])

On Prioritizing Sound & Music

• “I think we should really use the emotional power of music to manipulate our listeners... I’m very aware music can do a lot of work besides the content I’m trying to communicate.”
  —Fanny Grabinski ([46:07])

On the Future of Scholarly Podcasting

• “I do believe... as that [academic podcasting] grows, the audience will grow... there’s a lot of room.”
  —Benjamin Walker ([54:14])

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Topical Timestamps

• Opening & Framing the Intersection: [00:01]–[06:43]
• Tuning Time Podcast Excerpt & Discussion: [06:43]–[31:42]
• Elephant in the Piano Discussion & Audio Clips: [31:49]–[47:59]
• Questions: Audience, Academic Acceptance, Application Beyond Sound: [47:59]–[60:28]

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Takeaways for Non-Listeners

• The episode provides an in-depth look at how scholarly podcasting can reshape both research outputs and scholarly process.
• Collaboration between academics and audio producers is central, sparking new research questions and storytelling methods.
• Podcasts allow “footnotes” and tangential findings to evolve into main narratives, giving voice—sometimes literally—to marginalized perspectives and historical actors.
• While podcasting can be challenging for traditional academic disciplines, participants argue it is possible and even enriching to translate dense theory and history into engaging audio when approached creatively.
• The panel offers models for other academics: embrace collaboration, use podcasting as a complement—not a replacement—for print, and be open to new audiences and storytelling possibilities.

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Transcript

[Moderator]

Welcome to the new books network.

[Robert Boynton]

Welcome to this special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities Vault Podcast. I'm Robert Boynton. On May 13, 2026, Princeton's center for Human Values hosted a day long conference titled Audio and Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcast. It was co sponsored by Princeton's Journalism program and the NYU Podcast Initiative. Over the course of four panels, scholars, podcasters and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research. In the first panel, Benjamin Walker discusses Tuning Time, a podcast about the politics of time stretching with NYU Professor Maura Mills. Professor Mills teaches in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication and is Director of the NYU center for Disability Studies. Benjamin Walker is one of the co founders of the podcast network Radiotopia from PRX and for a decade hosted and produced his award winning program Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. The panel concludes with a presentation by NYU musicologist Fanny Grabinski in which she discusses her current project, the Elephant in the Music Ecology Empire. The book and podcast is an investigation of the 19th century piano through a material history of its primary components ivory, wood, felt and metal. The first voice you'll hear is Professor Andrew Chanel, a professor of religion at Princeton and the co sponsor of this conference.

[Andrew Chappel]

I'm a professor here in the Religion department in the center for Human Values which is sponsoring this event. I wanted to thank in addition to the uchv, the Humanities Council, which has also been supportive of this, and the journalism program in particular the director Eliza Griswold who has been supportive of this. Rob Boynton is the Director of the Literary reportage program at NYU's Arthur Carter Journalism Institute. And this caught my eye and we talked about this on the phone. He graduated with honors in Philosophy and Religion from Haverford and then got an MA in Political Science from Yale. So a perfect UCHV profile in some ways. His book the Invitation Only Zone was published in 2016. The New New Journalism published by Vintage in 2005. So I'll hand it over to Rob to emcee the rest of the afternoon.

[Moderator]

This program is a second part of a public discussion about podcasting and academia, about ideas and audio. To use that hoary cliche, it's been more important for academics, intellectuals of all sorts to reach out and show the public the dimension of their work that is related to the public world, or even just taking their private intellectual work and showing it in a public way. Benjamin Walker and I got a grant about a year and a half ago to explore this, the ideas and academia Sort of nexus. And we've been producing two different podcasts you're going to hear about in our first session, and then also holding these events. The sort of unarticulated, minor premise of this whole project really is that podcasting and audio are such powerful mediums, it would be a shame if it were reduced to chat and discussion. That there's nothing wrong with chat. Chat can be great, but it should be the floor, not the ceiling, for what we do. I'm sure the people in this room listen to all sorts of fantastic narrative podcasts of all sorts. People here have produced all sorts of great podcasts. My colleague Ellen Horn was one of the founders of Radiolab, one of the great shining examples of what one can do with ideas and narrative audio. But we haven't really come up with a good way to encourage that among people who are not by nature journalists or audio folks. There is a way that I think that the nexus between great ideas that are often housed in the university and great audio techniques that are the purview of all sorts of audio professionals and journalists, we have to do something to build bridges between that for both of their sakes. Narrative audio has been having a difficult time in the marketplace recently. And I think about the university as a place where, like in the Dark ages, knowledge goes to hide and can come out when things are good again. And I feel like this is an opportunity in some ways for the academy to really make some real progress in thinking about what idea driven podcasting can be. And that's what this project is hoping to do. I'm going to introduce now the three panelists for the first discussion. Benjamin Walker, Mara Mills, Fanny Grabinski. And they're going to talk about the projects they're working on with Benjamin right now. So thank you very much for coming.

[Andrew Chappel]

Awesome.

[Benjamin Walker]

It's great to be here. Thank you for bringing us. So my name is Benjamin Walker. I'm not an academic. I come to this intersection of podcasting and academia as a podcast maker, and I come to that from public radio. I'm one of the co founders of the network Radiotopia. And for the past decade I was hosting and producing my own show, which is called the Theory of Everything. And how I get to hear is. In 2024, I did this 10 hour group biography podcast called Not All Propaganda is Art. And it was just something different than I'd ever done before. I consulted over like 25 archival collections around the world. The biggest difference was that I spent like four years on it, which is a luxury that none of us really have in the media world. And I found myself when I finished kind of grav and thinking about, well, who does have the time like that? And then I started thinking about scholars and that's kind of how I ended up at this intersection. And there really is a lot of different things happening at this intersection of podcasting and academia. But I want to tell you about what we've been up to. It's a pretty unique, I believe, intervention. You know, at the core of it is the idea of doing original scholarship as podcast. And there are a couple other parameters and hypotheses to discuss. And it's really been great to be working with Rob and Chenjerai and Ellen and others at NYU on this. But since I have the two scholars, the hosts of these two podcasts with us here, I really want to just jump into the shows themselves. And we're going to start with the opening nine and a half, ten minutes of Mara's show. And then we're going to just launch into talking about that.

[Narrator]

There's a popular talk show on social media called Subway Takes.

[Kareem Rama]

Yo, what's up guys? We're on our way to go meet up with Cate Blanchett for Subway Takes Uncut.

[Narrator]

Kareem Rama interviews celebrities on the New York City subway holding a microphone attached to a Metro card rip and asks for their most controversial opinions. So what's your take?

[Kareem Rama]

What an honor for me to take the first ever subway ride with Jane Goodall.

[Maura Mills]

Yeah, and I'm looking forward to it.

[Narrator]

In October of 2025, Ira Glass, host of the radio show this American Life, took a riot on Subway Takes and said something that shocked the podcasting community.

[Kareem Rama]

So what's your take?

[Maura Mills]

Every podcast is, is better at 2.0

[Kareem Rama]

speed, double speed, or 1.7 speed. 100% disagree.

[Narrator]

For over 30 years, Ira Glass has been associated with Prestige Radio producing these intricately designed, award winning audio documentaries.

[Kareem Rama]

If you're gonna listen to something, you should just listen to it. I don't understand why you would want to listen to it faster. Listen at 1.7, 2.0. First of all, your brain can take it in.

[Maura Mills]

You totally can get the information and

[Kareem Rama]

you can listen to more podcast, I guess.

[Narrator]

And also, just like Ira Glass is not alone. By many estimates, at least half of podcast listeners are now speeding up playback. And average listening rates are increasing every year. Who knows, maybe you're listening to me right now at 1.25 speed, or 25% faster than normal, or perhaps 1.5 speed. Or if you're in a real hurry 2.0 speed my name is Mara Mills and this podcast you're listening to at whatever speed is called Tuning Time. This is the story of a technology that has become ubiquitous, changing the pace of human listening. Side effects include drowsiness, dizziness, tired feeling, mild nausea, stomach pain, upset stomach, constipation, dry mouth, changes in appetite or weight, sleep problems or decreased sex drive, impotence or difficulty having an orgasm. But in most cases, the technology time stretching is imperceptible. Hold on, I'll say that again. This time my voice has been slightly time stretched so that it syncs with the drums. But in most cases the technology time stretches. Stretching is imperceptible. I'm a professor of Media Studies and Disability Studies at nyu. About a decade ago, I became interested in the history of time stretching when I was digging through boxes of old tapes in the garage of a retired blind technologist who lived outside Chicago. Many of the tapes, dating to the 1960s, just contained high speed versions of audiobooks. To my 21st century ear, they didn't sound like anything special. At first, the recordings didn't sound like they would have a complex technical and social history. It turns out that physicists and telephone engineers and cryptologists had been pursuing time stretching for over a century, almost since the beginning of sound recording itself. And blind readers, the first creators and users of audiobooks, began experimenting with time stretching sound long before the technology became commercially available. That story is half of this podcast. Experimental musicians had also been tweaking playback speed to create new sounds since the early days of recording, and when tape became available after World War II, they began to time stretch and pitch shift the voice. That's the other half of this podcast.

[Jonathan Stern]

You might have come across Justin Bieber 800% slower or Beethoven nine beat stretch, which is a 24 hour version of Beethoven's ninth.

[Narrator]

That's my colleague and friend, Jonathan Stern, a scholar who helped found the field of sound studies. After writing a book on the MP3, Jonathan became interested in the history of autotune, a tool that is often used to pitch correct voices. We were part of an academic Residency Together in 2017, the Epistemes of Modern Acoustics Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Jonathan and I spent a lot of time listening and writing together that year, and we realized that our interests in time stretching and autotune shared a genealogy. We decided to co author a book, Tuning Time, on the entangled histories of blind reading practices, military engineering, and electronic music that eventually yielded time stretching. Now a nondescript dropdown menu item on audio editing software, and a button on your podcast listening app.

[Fanny Grabinski]

We are honored and delighted to be joined by Jonathan Stern and Mara Mills for the symposium keynote.

[Narrator]

We gave many talks at universities and art institutes around the world, like this keynote at the Sonorities Festival in Belfast in 2021.

[Jonathan Stern]

So today I'm going to explain to you what time stretching is. I'm going to give you a Netflix serial style previously on when sound recording first became functionally possible on Edison cylinder phonographs, they were hand cranked. You had to crank it at exactly this playback speed you wanted or the pitch would warble, it would go up and down.

[Narrator]

Jonathan and I shared an uncommon interest in the history of sound technology and disability, and we had co authored other articles throughout our careers. We came to our professorships in media studies from biology and history in my case, and cultural studies in music in Jonathan's. We made a good team to explain the scientific fundamentals, musical techniques and disability politics underlying a range of black boxed digital tools, from speech synthesizers to auto tune in Edison's time, the early era of 19th century Phonograph cylinders and later gramophone discs. If you sped up sound recordings, my

[Maura Mills]

voice would start to sound wildly high pitched like this.

[Narrator]

And if you slowed down an old

[Maura Mills]

record of my voice, it would turn into a growl and then become distorted.

[Jonathan Stern]

In other words, whenever you slow sound play back down, the pitch goes down. Whenever you speed it up, the pitch goes up.

[Narrator]

With the digital time stretching tools we have today and their tape based predecessors, we can speed my voice to astronomical rates without changing the pitch much, if at all, or slow my voice down without deepening it.

[Jonathan Stern]

The important thing to take away from that is that speed and pitch are independent from one another. This is a totally normal thing today and it is happening everywhere.

[Narrator]

For instance, time stretching can create what might be thought of as a temporal remix of a pop song, like the sped up remixes of Lana Del Rey's music. And on TikTok you will find an endless stream of slowed and reverbed remixes. Jonathan and I were about 80% done with our project last year. We had collected and digitized hundreds of taped sound recordings taken from the first time stretching devices built in the US and Germany in the second half of the 20th century. It took a long time for us to listen to all of these tapes, even if they were already sped up. The archive for our book highlighted a problem of listening in time. How to skim or skip around While reading by ear, we were wondering if we should release an audiobook or a multimedia website alongside the print book to make this collection of sound files gathered from the homes and manuscript collections of early users publicly available. It's an otherwise nearly lost history of a sonic technique. Jonathan had been living with cancer for many years, and it informed all of his later writing, from academic work to a popular blog. His type of cancer was typically slow growing, and we felt we had all the time in the world to work on this book. It was a side project for both of us, and we came together once a year to write a chapter or article on time stretching. All of a sudden, in fall 2024, Jonathan's illness accelerated in a very material way. We felt time compressing for this project and the many others he was working on. Around the same time, we were contacted by Benjamin Walker about a podcast series he was hatching at NYU Original Research and Scholarship. As Podcasts, Jonathan and I talked about the potentials for a podcast version of Tuning Time while he was in hospice. He was game, even though neither of us knew how the book would be completed or how he would speak as an author across each episode. This was March 2025, the month Jonathan died. There are many recordings online of Jonathan giving lectures about this research and other recordings he made with bandmates, using time stretching to compose or edit his own music. Working on this podcast has required me to listen again to our archive alongside a team of audio producers with their own body of sonic expertise, and also to complete the segments of the book Jonathan had been writing about experimental music and autotune. It has launched me into an unexpected research process of working through Jonathan's footnotes, contacting the colleagues with shared expertise whose work had inspired him. In podcast format, Jonathan's list of typical academic footnotes are animated into the fuller interpretations of these scholars, and they've led me and the production team down new research paths.

[Benjamin Walker]

I'm gonna just turn it over to you. My first question is. I'd love to hear more about where we end up there. This New research paths.

[Maura Mills]

I'm so gutted right now.

[Interviewer/Host]

It's so.

[Maura Mills]

Jonathan was really one of my best friends. I'm usually not an emotional person in public talks, but that was hard. It was very hard. I am a gay person. Jonathan I always described as my work husband. We were very, very close. The timing of you knocking on the door of my office last spring was so fortuitous because Jonathan and I were just engrossed in these conversations about how to put our co authored work out. This being just one of the many projects we had Talked to a number of publishers about creating audiobooks. Almost all academic publishers were unwilling and unable to fund that. And we didn't know how we would raise funds to produce an audiobook version ourselves. So we were sort of scrambling around. This can't just be a print book. The archive is like thousands of digitized archival audio files in historical tape and phonograph format. We had many grants, like hundreds of thousands of dollars to digitize those. So it was really lucky to have met you. And I'll just say that I've been interviewed for a lot of podcasts, just as a talking head. I think the chat and discussion format that Rob was just mentioning over my career. But I've never been part of an academic podcast series, and perhaps there aren't very many of them. So I didn't know what I was getting into. Maybe you didn't either. What I've learned is that, you know, to create an academic podcast is to enter into a collaborative research relationship with an audio producer. Co research is a really intense entanglement. It's not always as intense as my entanglement with Jonathan because that began when I was a grad student. It's like, defined my entire career. But, you know, it's an intense entanglement to co author and co research. And you have become my co researcher in the past year. And I can explain some ways that that's happened. But we hadn't met before. We didn't know each other. I'm not even really sure how you found me at nyu. Did you know what you were getting into?

[Benjamin Walker]

I will say, like, this idea of this topic, not in audio. I'm really. I've been fascinated in imagining, like, how you and Jonathan talked about this before, because I love this clip and I wanted to play it today because you can actually understand the concept. Like, it works so well in audio. I have a hard time imagining how it would work on paper.

[Maura Mills]

Yeah, I mean, one of the things Jonathan and I would talk about, we probably have given like a dozen talks on this topic, and we often felt that we had this huge startup effort to explain to people what time stretching was. It's ubiquitous, but also seems kind of esoteric. And there's a ton of, in media studies, our professional fields, heavy lifting to do around philosophy and time and also in the history of physics, around time and sound. So we always felt that there was like 20 minutes of preamble about what is time stretching? And, like, why is this significant to both popular media today in, like, the long history of physics and philosophy? And it's much easier to get at that very quickly in sound. My project was already a collaborative research project that may not be typical in the humanities. I'm a media studies professor at NYU Steinhardt. It's a professional school where I get credit for doing things like podcasts. Half of my work is the typical exegesis, solo authored work that people in the humanities are trained to do. But the other half of my work is collaborative. I do a lot of community collaborations, run a lot of grants through the center for Disability Studies. So it's intuitive to me to do collaborative research. That is a big part of my career. And I trained in the sciences as a lab scientist and dropped out after my master's and then switched fields. So I'm curious to know, working with other people in the humanities, if bending a monograph that's single authored into something collaborative is going to be harder for me.

[Narrator]

It was just, it was like, this

[Maura Mills]

is already a collaborative project. I'm not married to every single word and idea because they aren't all mine anyway. I felt that moving into co researching with you and Andrew and the other people on your team has been an adjustment, but it's been like such a productive tweaking that's opened up all these new research paths. So I've often said to you that, and this is because I haven't done anything like this before, that the problem process that we feel something like what I imagine the process of cinematography or making a movie must feel like to an actor, where you're like, being directed, which I just really am not used to having that happen where like, Jonathan

[Narrator]

and I had done tons of writing.

[Maura Mills]

I have to do a bunch of new writing alone now. I gave you this huge archive of sound files last year that you listened to. Jonathan and I had already picked out the sound files we were writing about, but you listened to everything all over again. That, that takes months. I gave you the writing we had done, but then you, with your ear of knowing podcasting audiences, but also your ear of knowing how to write in sound, you basically have created scripts for these three episodes, carved that out of like the six chapters that we thought we were writing. And you've also taken an interest in particular sound files from the archive that weren't necessarily the ones that we found interesting or we're writing about. So basically I have been given by you this cut through our writing and our archive that wasn't necessarily what I thought we were going to work on. And then this is where the collaborative research comes in. I've had to rewrite those scripts, of course, because I have a PhD in history. So I'm also very finicky about being precise and accurate. So I've gone back through and rewritten those. It's forced both of us to do research, to finish telling some of the stories that I didn't think were going to become stories. And we've also cut certain things, so we have a whole chapter on the history of 19th century physics in the book. That's gone. It's not going to work in sound. We didn't have a lot of sound files for that. That's not in the podcast. But there were all these things that you brought, you drew out and said, I think this is important, that were just asides in a lecture Jonathan gave or a footnote that I had thrown in somewhere or a sound file in the archive that we passed over. And that now is a huge moment in the podcast. You aren't getting this from the teaser. We've done tons of interviews. There's tons of archival sound files. They're not in that teaser at all. But I'll just give a couple of examples to be concrete. Became really interested in the history of the idea of the chipmunk voice. This phrase in English that goes back decades for a high pitched, sped up voice. That was like an aside in a talk Jonathan gave. And I was like, I don't know. I don't feel like writing about this. Like, I don't know the history of that. But then actually I realized one of Jonathan's students, former students, now a professor, had written a book with the whole thing on the chipmunk voice. And I was like, wait, this is cool and it's such a good story. And you were totally right. So then we're interviewing that person on Friday. And a pivot point and a pivot

[Benjamin Walker]

point for the blonde disability story and the music.

[Maura Mills]

And also, like, you know, you were interested in the fact that, like, Wendy Carlos was one of the first users of the Ultra Rate Changer in the US we went down a whole path of trying to do interviews with Wendy. You know, that was like two sentences in an article that we had published. You also found in the archive printouts of emailed interviews that one of my wonderful RAS 10 years ago, Shafika Hash Hash, a blind student formerly at nyu, had sent out to the entire NFB National Federation of the Blind list, generating tons of feedback, which we ended up barely using. And you were like, I want to interview all these people again who said

[Benjamin Walker]

that they would be okay. With being contacted.

[Maura Mills]

They did, absolutely. So it was just like people who I had only pulled out a couple of quotes from, you were like, we need a fuller interview with these people. And that is a wonderful research instinct. Jonathan and I, these long histories, partly by virtue of the era of our training in media studies, there was like a Foucaultian overtone of like, let's do a deep genealogy of everything digital and bring it back to the 19th century and say that it has to do with industrial capitalism or something. I'm being really dismissive of this strain of work. And it the book version, I believe that it's correct. But like, because we narrowed the timescale, we can expand the interviews because so we were like touching really lightly on these different temporal moments. But a lot of them can be expanded now. But that's meant more research, more interviews, following up on things. There's more time. The other thing I would say a lot of the footnotes. So Jonathan was writing a lot about electronic music and that was his area of expertise, not mine, and he hadn't finished the writing. So instead of, of me having to pretend to be a music theorist, what we've done is take his footnotes and contact those people. Many of them are scholars I knew and just interview them and they are no longer a footnote. Our currency in academia, we don't get paid to do a lot of the stuff we do. Our currency is but being cited. And sadly that's ever increasing with especially those of us in schools like mine with the metrics of Google Scholar. It's like the citation as currency. So, so the citation, what is it? It's a footnote. And so having certain scholars actually tell this bigger story about their insights about certain composers and their theories of time and why they used these tape based time stretching devices has been really fascinating. And it also does justice to that scholarship, the years of scholarship, the years of expertise that those people put into that work, which you know, in our print book is getting reduced to a sentence and a footnote, but because that is how we work. So that's been pretty fascinating. And I've also loved sort of walking back through Jonathan's friendship network scholarly network, which is overlapping but not identical to mine. The other thing I want to say is you have also become a researcher on this topic and I don't know if you knew you were going to do that. I don't know if it's felt good to you to have to do that or if you've enjoyed this particular topic. But for instance, you and Andrew, the other producer, the audio producer, editor, have a lot of expertise in sound that I don't have. And like Jonathan and I had. Where we ended in our narrative so far was in the 70s when time stretching was digital hardware based, not software based, and had just become commercialized. We knew we had to do a chapter somewhere in the realm of today to chapter about the fact that time stretching is everywhere for editors as well as users. And it's on social media, cable TV, YouTube videos, Zoom. All of my students probably speed me

[Narrator]

up to the max when they have

[Maura Mills]

a recorded lecture by me. But you have a better instinct about this present moment even than I do. And you came to me with all these really interesting anecdotes about time stretching already in your world. One early moment in the project is the beginning of audiobooks, the first talking books, which were the first long playing records made for blind people by RCA

[Narrator]

and the American foundation for the Blind,

[Maura Mills]

both at the time in New York,

[Benjamin Walker]

which you've written a lot about, though.

[Maura Mills]

Tons about. And there's tons of stuff. And I've been in podcasts about, as in talking head, doing chat. But you became interested in some of the Broadway stars who were the first narrators, but you were like, oh, I want to find out more about this one narrator. So you've then found all these other sound files. You have a sense of voice that is very different from mine. I think of myself as working on the voice, but it's mostly through print, especially because, you know, I do a lot of 19th century history. I work on sound, but not always sound record, recorded sound.

[Benjamin Walker]

The files were in your archive. Like you had, like, I had parameters, you know, you had, through your work, had digitized these files we're working on, you know, so I learned about some of these connections from your work.

[Maura Mills]

But then you found more. One of the blind researchers at the AFB who made talking books, you found much more sound of her online that I had not heard and didn't know about. So that you actually have been doing research alongside me as we create the episodes, which I've liked that because I like collaborating. I'm curious about this as a model with other academics because for me, I'm like, like, again, this was already a collaborative project. So the other thing is that's felt. This is a totally mixed metaphor. It's felt cinematographic to me. But it's probably actually whatever the conjugate podcasting is that you guys are directing me when we record. And I'm used to just chat, talking BSing or being a professoring. You know, this is also a professoring performance. Whatever kind of talk I'm being called on to do, I do. But you're actually directing me. That was probably the biggest adjustment. So I sit with them in a studio for two hours. We've gone over and over again rewriting this script. And I say it and then it's like, ooh, that didn't sound good. Or there's certain sentences that I cannot get out of my mouth.

[Narrator]

I was in speech therapy as a kid.

[Maura Mills]

I tend to talk really fast. I think you've time stretched me in places where you're not saying your time stretched me, but because I don't think I talk that silly, you direct me as I'm speaking and then we are rewriting the script as I'm speaking and Andrew's jumping in being like, oh, I have the perfect example for this. You guys have a mental file of sound effects that I don't have. And that mental file of sound effects enters into the project and some of your thoughts. You know, I myself in a research system in the fall, I really wasn't thinking about YouTube very much. You've been telling me a lot and I wasn't thinking about users enough. And that turn from time stretching by producers and editors to the fact that all of us as users are doing it now and your interests got me and my researcher to do a ton of work in the fall on the legal history and the legal. The lawsuits around being able to for YouTube being able to let users speed up because a lot of actors and film directors don't want kind of like colorization. They don't want their artwork altered at all. So we went down this whole new research path. But that's partly because of your interest in something like say, YouTube. It's been like this outgrowth co research process from something that already was collaborative.

[Benjamin Walker]

Let's maybe come back to more questions and hear from Fanny, our other scholar who we've been working about her project.

[Fanny Grabinski]

Thank you so much for inviting us here and having this conversation with us. It's such an exciting time for us to be together around the same table because it's actually the first time over the course of this one year program. I'm such an admirer of Myra's work and so I was so excited to have a, a sneak peek into this episode zero that we just heard together. And I just want to say how, how much I love it and I can't wait to listen to the whole podcast. I was also very interested this is the first time I hear about your experience working in this context, so I'm. It resonates with some of my experiences, but also my project is a little bit different, I think, so I will just introduce it briefly. So I'm. I should have done an audio only thing, but because I'm a scholar, I'm used to using visuals as well. So I invite you to maybe turn to the screen, although it's not completely crucial. The podcast project, which is also my current book project, which is very much a monograph to bend into a podcast, although it's a monograph in progress, so it's not a finished thing. The Elephant in the Piano Music Ecology Empire investigates the history of the piano at the turn of the 20th century in the United States through the perspective of its primary materials, including wood, ivory, metal and felt or wool. This was a time when the piano was absolutely ubiquitous across the world and diverse segments of societies, and as a result, its manufacture exerted considerable pressure on the environments and communities that provided its materials. In examining the extract, transportation and transformation of the various materials that went into the instrument, the project shows that the modern piano was not simply a cultural artifact, but a material assemblage through which systems of empire, extraction and industrial capitalism were translated into musical sound and everyday experience. Tracing how wood, ivory, metal and felt moved from elephants and habitats, forests, mines and pastures, into concert halls and domestic interiors, the Elephant in the Piano reveals how musical modernity was built upon and helped naturalize the ecological and political infrastructures of modern global capitalism. So why focus on the piano to write this political ecology? First, as I was saying, the piano was literally everywhere at the turn of the 20th century. Imagine a time when there is no radio, no computers, no nothing. So that's the primary kind of sound producing technology. It's also a particularly large and complex instrument. There's between 10,000 and 12,000 pieces in any modern piano, so it's one of the most materially hungry instrument you could possibly think of. Relatedly, and this seems especially important for the podcast, the piano offers an opportunity, I think, to engage audiences. And you'll tell me if I asked each of you in this room if you know what a piano is, it's likely that you all have some kind of pre existing relationship with the instrument. Yet just like your car perhaps, you probably don't know exactly what's in it, let alone where the materials come from. And so there's this element of familiarity and mystery or curiosity that we're hoping to benefit from with the podcast. As you see, the Book and the podcast is organized around chapters and episodes that each follow one material. And the idea with each of these chapters and episodes is really to follow these materials wherever they lead and to give you a sense of what that means. We just wanted to share with you two clips related to the first episode on wood in which we follow Adirondack spruce, which is the material that was used for the construction of piano soundboards at the turn of the 20th century. And the soundboard is that piece of wood which you see here that goes inside the piano, so below the metal frame, and serves as a loudspeaker, so it amplifies the sound of the strings. The first clip you'll hear is from an interview we did at the Steinway factory in Long island about a year ago, where we met Mike Moore, one of the longest serving employees, who started as what he called a belly man, that is someone working inside the piano. And here's how he talked about spruce and the way it works in soundboards.

[Maura Mills]

So the best soundboard spruce has the

[Moderator]

highest stiffness to weight ratio.

[Maura Mills]

It's very stiff along the line of

[Kareem Rama]

the grain, but it's also very light.

[Maura Mills]

So it's free to vibrate and eager to vibrate and eager to move the air.

[Fanny Grabinski]

Okay, now a good way to understand the specific qualities of a material is to see how they play out in other contexts than in the piano. So while traveling in the Adirondack forest, so this has been our research, the version of our research collaboration is take trips and, you know, do a lot of this research together in many, many different places, we stumbled across another iconic spruce based technology at the turn of the 20th century, the Adirondack guideboat, which we discussed with a boat builder named Nate while sitting on his boat.

[Nate (Boat Builder)]

In the small boat world, it's really just all about portability. Yeah. So for the guide boat, maybe more than anything else, which is why it's the only one that's using this extremely difficult piece of wood to get that's, you know, not super common. The weight is the most important part. You know, I would never build this boat like this at all if weight wasn't the factor. It's the number one factor for the boat. So weight to strength ratio means I can take a piece of wood, I can physically make it as small as possible and still retain enough strength to make a functional object that will last a very long time.

[Fanny Grabinski]

So strength to weight ratio in another context, and then this is how we kind of wrap our head around the qualities of this particular material and Trace its genealogy. So now thinking about what the podcast is doing to the project and the relationship between the book and the podcast, there are two main ways I'm thinking about it. So first I'll explain why make a book and a podcast? And that's, I think, a legitimate question when you see how much work it is to do something like, I certainly realized that. And then how does the podcast change the book? And this is thinking about the way, and maybe that's of interest to some, both people from both worlds in the room to think about these intersections and the way it reshapes each of these fields. The first reason why I'm excited to do a book and a podcast is that although I'm writing about the past, I'm a historian. The stories I'm telling are still very much happening in the present. The stories that I'm training have shaped urban and rural landscapes as well as the lives of human and non human communities all the way to the present. From the beginning of the research, I found myself traveling in local people's cars, looking at buildings, roads, ponds, dams and forests as traces of the extractive practices I was writing about. There's also a great deal of emotional involvement in histories as communities are grappling with the consequences of the various trades I'm looking at. And here I'm thinking especially about the most intense example, which is the extermination of elephants for making piano keys. So the project from the beginning has very much been a mix of history and other methodologies. The other reason why I've been combining these methodologies is because there's a lot of imbalance in the historical record when you're tracing histories of materials. While there is hundreds of boxes reflecting the strategies of big companies like Steinway, it's much harder to access the experiences of workers. And it's a challenge to approach trees, animals and minerals as the very active forces they've been in all of these stories. That's also why I've turned to site visits, interviews, and oral history even before thinking about the podcast to overcome this asymmetry in the archive. This, in turn, has resulted in notes on my many encounters with people and places in the present that I was not really sure what to do with. I was not sure if and if so, how I would include that in the book. And the podcast offers, I think, a wonderful home for these materials to illustrate the resonance of the stories I'm tracing in the present and the richness of the relationships that have emerged because of these additional approaches to the stories. Over the course of the research, we wanted to play a show. Short clip we recorded last fall during a visit to Ivorytown, Connecticut. So like its name suggests, the world center for the making of ivory for piano keys between the 1850s and the 1950s. The voice you'll hear is that of Ian Basilone, a young, quote unquote emotional historian, as he calls himself, who is putting together a museum on the site of a former ivory key factory. Ian is also involved in the sea shanty community, and he sang us a song written by a friend whose family was involved in the manufacture of ivory keys.

[Ian Basilone]

I took my living from an old mill town across the river in Ivory Town where they built pianos of world renown Finest wood gave the grandest sound On Yankee ships from the Congo coast It paid our wages and made our day and generations settled down to a goodly life in Ivory Town. I've heard the path to the Congo coast is deep and far from the pachyderms go A thousand hands held the tusk so high from the slaver's lash came the bitter cry O weep for the loss with me. I've seen the photographs, they turn me pale of the bloated carcass with a tiny tail and the splintered stumps on either side for piano keys this great beast died oh, weep for the loss with me.

[Fanny Grabinski]

So how do you go about including something like this in a book? Which brings me to my next point. So the second reason why I'm excited to write a podcast in addition to the book is that it is a medium that is particularly well suited to the telling of material histories. I've obviously just recently started thinking about this, so there's probably more things to say and I'll be happy to to hear your thoughts. But I see at least two contributions of audio for telling material histories. So first, audio helps convey the kind of more than human relationships and embodied experiences that I'm tracing. And so to illustrate this, we wanted to play another glimpse into a recording we did in Connecticut in front of an ivory keyed piano at a local historical society where the former president, Jeff Hoffman, shared his feelings about ivory.

[Maura Mills]

Ivory has almost exudes a warmth, you know, you can almost. It just kind of talks to you.

[Fanny Grabinski]

It just kind of talks to you.

[Maura Mills]

Well, it does to me.

[Fanny Grabinski]

What does it tell you?

[Maura Mills]

It just says, I'm. I'm something special.

[Benjamin Walker]

I'm

[Kareem Rama]

alive.

[Fanny Grabinski]

So obviously there's something quite moving about the materiality of his voice. Jeff is quite an elderly person, so all of that, again, hard to make in a book. Ojo is also a great medium to deal with the scales of material histories, including deep time and global reach. And here I'm again kind of out of my league in the presence of so many podcast experts. But it seems to me that the ability to juxtapose clips from highly disparate places, people and things can help cover a lot of ground and convey the variety of places, actors, time periods, and so on involved in the history of the materials that I'm following. So this is not just making great audio, hopefully, but also enriches the book. And so I'm similar to Mara. I'm now going to talk about the way in which this collaboration has reshaped my work on the book. The first important thing, I think, is to think about the way in which we're casting characters. And that kind of speaks to the idea of tracing some of the people in the footnotes and make them really characters in the show. And so this sort of creates a demultiplication of voices. You're no longer the single voice. You're kind of like a curator who's opening up the floor for other people as well. An important thing about that is that we're not. It's not ethnographic work. You know, at first I was like, oh, I'm doing it kind of. And it's like, no, it's not ethnography. We keep correcting people. We're like, can you say that again? Can you be more eloquent? Can you repeat the thing you said five minutes ago and then condense it with another sentence? And so this is, you know, it's very staged, but it also means that we're trying to put, you know, people on their. The best version of people's thinking on the show. And this, in the end, makes something like a cast of theorists that are thinking alongside me. And it's not just me, you know, kind of delivering my theory or the history. It's like. It's very much a kind of collaborative way of writing. And so I appreciate also what you're saying about this sort of politics of citation and the way in which it felt like a very fair way of giving credit to a lot of people. We're thinking with and learning from when we're doing that kind of work, which is. Okay, it was my second vent character as a theorist. And finally the thing I wanted to emphasize, and maybe we'll talk a little more about that. But I also really wanted to give credit to Benjamin for insisting on always looking for sound archives everywhere we go. The first question is, is there sound archives? Which is not something that, you know, like Mara, I'm very much used to print and, you know, reading lots of archives and sound. It's great if it's there. But, you know, I didn't necessarily. I was not used to working with this. So in that way, we've sort of, again, curated this kind of very rich corpus of archives, and a lot of them are sonic. And because we're looking for sort of eloquent sources for the show, we've been looking at a lot of, you know, music also, which I've always told the team that I think we should really use the emotional power of music to manipulate our listeners. I shouldn't say that in that way, but you understand that as a teacher, I'm very aware that music can do a lot of work for me besides just the kind of content that I'm trying to communicate. So we've been systematically prioritizing that in our research. For me, it's inspired me to think about the overall goal of this project as a way of. Of cultivating kind of a layered listening to all the musics and sounds that are tucked in a piano. And so, for example, in the Spruce episode, and I was kind of reviewing our scripts with that in mind, we have a mix of romantic piano music, a character singing a high school hymn, guitar music, logging songs and love songs that were performed on Broadway. And likewise in the Ivory episode, we have turn of the century songs from American music, musicals, Shanti song, Ivory caravan, Porter songs recording from West African ceremonies using ivory trumpets, and so on. So for me, as a music scholars, it's really interesting to see how I'm kind of challenging established boundaries between different areas and eras of study. And I think it's interesting also for the humanities more broadly. So I'll stop here and thanks so much for your attention.

[Moderator]

So we can take questions.

[Benjamin Walker]

We have about 15 minutes. I think what's really unique about Fanny's work is, as she said, this is a work in progress. My early conception was, oh, wow, I'm going to be an extra resource. And I always imagined this like being contributing to it. But at the same time, it was also very important to see that in a way, this is a very. She's on a path, she's doing work. It's almost. Sometimes we can. Can maybe get in the way. Like, I didn't want to be the intruder, I wanted to be the contributor. And it seems that one of the original hypotheses we had was doing original work might be Sort of early in the process versus later. And it's really great to go through and see how much of a contribution it can make. But at the same time I still feel that when you're figuring out the argument, the text, like the only person who can do that is you.

[Fanny Grabinski]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of like not to inflate our work, but it's kind of like, you know, the game, Game of Thrones writing, like when the show got ahead of the book. And so you kind of, you have to stay ahead of the show because otherwise you don't know where the argument is. And these are quite complex. I'm so impressed by, and I want to say hi to Julia Barton and Benjamin Walker. And we have two students who are helping out, Claudia Lankin and Amina Adem. And I'm so grateful to their willingness to engage with these incredibly complex and sensitive questions. And we're all in it together, trying to find our way. But yeah, I have to be the lead, so I have to be ahead.

[Benjamin Walker]

And I would say that you're faster than I would. I mean the speed at what you work is really mind boggling and impressive. And I would say that we've not gotten too far ahead because you're able to stay ahead of us. But if that wasn't the case, we may have been in more trouble. So I feel like my hypothesis early on with Rob and Chenjoy that like, you know, doing this original work at the beginning may be a little bit more ambitious than possible. If you can't stay ahead of it, that's one thing I feel like a question from Alison.

[M]

Hey, Alison Cruz, you'll hear from me in a bit. Thank you for sharing these projects. It's exciting. And I have a question about audience which I think has been somewhat tacit so far. As academics, you know, we're used to, to being listened to, whether that's in talks or in lecture halls or you know, other around faculty meeting tables. Maybe we're lucky if we're listened to there. But in any case, the motivations for that listening are really different than in this medium. And so I just wanted to ask a little about both who you see as the audience for this particular project, these respective podcasts in particular that are research driven and narrative, but also like that question about, like, you know, how it changes our sense as academics of who's listening and why to do this kind of work.

[Benjamin Walker]

Before I turn to these two, I can just say that when Rob and I and Chenjerai and even Ellen Some of our early conversations, it was always like, if you told us to make a popular podcast, we would have to admit that we can't do that. But if thinking about making a podcast for like sound studies or the musicology group, like, I think we can hit that audience. Like, I've been to the academic conferences where it's a panel and imagining like when these are done and Fanny can present this maybe as a listening session at night at a musicological conference, maybe at the Met. I don't know. I think we could really succeed on levels with targeted audiences first and then thinking at a general audience second. That to me feels really exciting.

[Maura Mills]

Over the years, the places that Jonathan and I have been asked to give talks about time stretching have varied so widely and I've been very surprised at where this resonates. We've given talks at a lot of music festivals. That piece that you had was from the Sonorities Music Festival in Belfast. That was a popular audience of people interested in music. To me, I think who might be interested in this would be anyone interested in sound technology. Nerds who are interested in time stretching. I personally hope blind audiences, because there's

[Narrator]

a huge component of this is, is

[Maura Mills]

all the sonic innovations that blind people over the last 70 years have made probably grad students as a research tool. I teach a lot of methods classes, hopefully anyone who is interested in podcasts, because we're getting so meta about podcasting in the scripts. So I would imagine that there would be that audience. I trust your instincts because sometimes I think, oh, I don't want to say, I don't know about that example. But then I, you know, like the opening you were like, we gotta do subway takes, which I was aware of, but it's not like my go to reference. But then I'm like, I'm gonna trust your instinct about this. Cause you're the podcaster. I'm in a massive department. We're as big as a liberal arts college. We have over a thousand undergrads. And I often had to learn how to teach a lecture to 300 freshmen because it's a required lecture on history of technology. And I, I have to work to get their attention. So I do think I know what it means to work to get the attention of. I would call 18 year olds a popular audience in some ways. So I can't say that I always landed that. But I think I'm willing to try to adjust my writing and I see what edits you make to my writing. I'm willing to adjust it for this

[Benjamin Walker]

you make them better and then you edit it again and.

[Maura Mills]

And the print version will come out and it will have the theory or the like little history of physics that I also want to be there, that I also like, but that will be for a very specialized audience.

[Fanny Grabinski]

I mean, I fully agree when you talk about, you know, I teach an undergraduate lecture for non music majors and non humanities major every year. I mean, there you go. I'm not sure I succeed, but I'm trying hard to make things palatable for them. And when I first started working on this project, some people said, you know, it would be a great trade book. There's so much interest in, you know, pianos. Like, it's an easy kind of entry point into questions that people love. History is about, you know, where does salt come from? But that's not my style of writing, right? Like I'm writing a book for Chicago. I'm going to keep writing as an academic, but I'm not sad. Like, doing the podcast makes me excited and I don't feel like I'm missing an opportunity to address this broader audience in the book and vice versa versa with the podcast. I'm not trying too hard. Julia would say it differently, perhaps would like to squeeze in some hardcore history or theory. I'm like, okay, you want that to go? It's gone. It'll be in the book. So I think it's a happy marriage in that way, both.

[Benjamin Walker]

And I would just add that this intersection of podcasting and academia is also. There's a lot going on there with new ecosystems of networks of listening. And I do believe that as that grows, the audience will grow for work like this too. Like, it's very hard to find an audience. The discoverability question is huge in podcasting. There's just too many. There's a gazillion of them. But I'm very excited about what's happening at this intersection because I feel that people who are coming there were the same kind of people who might have come to like, shows that are narrative podcasting shows or Radiolab or something like that. So it feels like there's a lot of room.

[N]

First, I want to say thank you for getting out of your academic comfort zones and engaging in a project like this. I heard Ben and Fanny present this in New York last October, and it's become my go to example to give to colleagues. Like, look, this is what's going on. I'm a historian, so I encounter a lot of skeptics amongst my academic friends towards this type of medium. They decry the Watering down of the material or not interested in that audience, et cetera, et cetera, I'd like to know for colleagues and friends who might be skeptical of or even afraid, because, like I said, you go outside your comfort zone to do this. What argument do you give to why academics should maybe explore supplementing their academic material with something like a podcast?

[Maura Mills]

I mean, being in a media studies department, a lot of my colleagues are involved in a wide range of projects beyond what they trained in in grad school, for instance. Like, we all have methodological expertise. We're historians, anthropologists, literary theorists. But I would say a lot of my colleagues are also doing arts criticism or producing films. So I actually don't get pushback at all for doing this. And I would say in the subfield of sound studies, which is how Fanny and I know each other, we've known each other probably 15 years, although Benjamin approached us separately. Sound studies is a small field, and Jonathan was one of the founders of the field, same with Emily Thompson, who was on my dissertation committee, professor here at Princeton. So it's a small field. It's a newish field.

[Narrator]

I found it to be an incredibly

[Maura Mills]

congenial field, and it includes a lot of sound artists. It's very interdisciplinary.

[Narrator]

I have not felt that pushback. I suppose if I got that pushback

[Maura Mills]

at this point in my career, having tenure, et cetera, et cetera, I think I just wouldn't care. And, you know, Jonathan was this very big force, really big personality named chair. You know, when he died, he was on his Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowship simultaneously. Like, he was at a point in his career where he could do whatever he wanted. He was super excited about this. And I think I see this also as an artist archive. And I think if I really got pushback from someone, I think at least saying, like, this is an archive, I'm so glad you're collating all these recordings of Jonathan and I, and also all these sound recordings that we digitized together, and that they're in one place, but I hope I don't have to resort to that. But I think that is one thing, that this. There's a future audience of researchers and listeners who. I don't know who they are and when they will come to this. But it also stands as that my

[Fanny Grabinski]

department is experimenting with podcasts. Like when we had the first dissertation defended as a podcast in our department.

[Benjamin Walker]

Did they succeed?

[Fanny Grabinski]

Yeah, it was a huge. And it was interesting because it was really. Students were so excited, and we talked about it at our end of year meeting as Something that really kind of federated our community again at the end of the year. And so there's a lot of excitement around this. Yeah, I mean, I think you start maybe with the easy, like the sound. Curious scholars. Maybe, you know, the next projects might create more pushback. Everyone's so excited about this project around me.

[Andrew Chappel]

So, yeah, since we're at the center for Human Values, I thought I would ask a question related to our fields, which are, you know, as I said, religion, but also politics, political theory, philosophy. So we don't have boats and ivory and sounds and so forth. I mean, we're. If somebody's doing a dissertation on Rousseau's theory of the general will or something like that, maybe this is a question mostly for you, like, how does an audio engineer think about doing abstract philosophy in audio?

[Benjamin Walker]

This sounds so doable. I'm just thinking about. No, really, like, these conversations that are the core of everything you do are contemporary. Like, they intersect with historical.

[Andrew Chappel]

So, like subway conversations?

[Benjamin Walker]

No. Or just like, these conversations, people thinking about the will. You know, there's a way that you would have a layer of these questions, but, you know, not to not take away the history, but, like, you could do a historical narrative and then connect that to these very big questions that we're grappling with today. I mean, I would assume that if the host is not grappling with these questions, then they're not going to do a very good job of the work anyway.

[Andrew Chappel]

So it can be done without the sound archives and all of the extra stuff that historians can use.

[Interviewer/Host]

Okay, thank you all so much. I just loved that conversation. And this question is a little redundant now, but it was for Benjamin.

[Fanny Grabinski]

No, no, no.

[Interviewer/Host]

Which is that both of these research projects in audio, obviously there's a really nice relationship between form and content. And I was wondering if you approached any other scholars, and if so, who and anybody outside history of Sound.

[Benjamin Walker]

We are definitely hoping to continue with this project. You know, as it's clear here, there's a lot of interest and curiosity towards this intersection. I feel so grateful that these were the two I got to do first. But I definitely hope that we get to continue, and I really do believe all of it is possible. Like, you can do so much with this idea of doing scholarly work in audio, you know, even if we have to make up the sounds. I think so.

[Maura Mills]

Okay, you're gonna take a technical break.

[Interviewer/Host]

Come back.

[Benjamin Walker]

I have those curves up

[Fanny Grabinski]

sa.