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Podcast Intellectuals Podcast Panel #1 with Benjamen Walker and Fanny Gribenski
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- [00:00]
Robert Boynton
New Year, New Me. Cute, but how about New Year, New Money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers, giving you time to power through those New Year's goals. You know you're gonna crush start the year off right.
- [00:20]
Benjamin Walker
Download the Experian app based on fico's
- [00:22]
Robert Boynton
great model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply, subject to credit check, which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details.
- [00:28]
Fanny Grabinski
Experian 5am I'm up with a crisp Celsius energy drink running 12 miles today. Grab a green juice, quick change and head to work. Meetings Workshops One more Celsius. No slowing down. Working late, but obviously still meeting the girls for a little dancing Celsius Live Fit. Go grab a cold, refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate now@celsius.com
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Benjamin Walker
an
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Robert Boynton
all new season of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.
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Benjamin Walker
Mom Talk has just been blowing up.
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Fanny Grabinski
Whitney and Jen are on Dancing with the Stars. Taylor is a bachelorette. Saying that out loud is crazy. Like that is huge.
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Robert Boynton
But all the cool opportunities could pull us apart.
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Fanny Grabinski
It's causing issues in everyone's marriage. My whole world is falling apart right now. It's chaos.
- [01:17]
Robert Boynton
Watch the Hulu Original Series the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers. Terms apply. Welcome to the New Books Network welcome to a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities Vault Podcast. I'm Robert Boynton. On October 10, 2025, NYU's Journalism Institute hosted a day long conference titled Podcast Producing Original Scholarship with Audio. Over the course of three panels, scholars, podcasters and journalists discussed how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research. In the first panel, podcaster Benjamin Walker discusses his work with NYU Media Studies professor Maura Mills as they produce Tuning Time, a podcast about the politics of time stretching technology. The first panel concluded with a presentation by NYU musicologist Fanny Grabinski in which she discussed 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. Among our goals is to work with academics to create two highly produced narrative limited series podcasts that represent the kind of intellectually serious scholarly work we know is possible. Another goal is to hold a series of public discussions to bring together other Stakeholders Audio Folk Academics Today is our first outing, and we plan to convene another event in the spring. We will also be holding a series of workshops for what we've come to call Podcast Curious Academics. In today's three panels, we'll discuss the way intellectuals are using audio to generate new scholarship, not simply to publicize existing work. As in commercial podcasting, much of the output is some form of chat these days, which has the virtue of being less expensive to record, edit and distribute. One of our hypotheses is that chat is the floor, not the ceiling, for academic podcasts. There's nothing wrong with conversational podcasts, of course. Some of them are fantastic. But it would be a shame if that was all we were inspired to do, if the word podcast became synonymous with chat. While the commercial podcast universe has expanded and contracted in the past decade, the world of academic podcasting has grown at a steady, if modest pace, and this may present the university with an opportunity. After all, the university has always been a place for smart, idealistic people to experiment. At a time when the market has turned its back on highly produced podcasts. Perhaps this is a good time for intellectuals of all stripes to explore the possibilities of idea driven narrative audio work. In 2023, the anthropologist Ian Cook interviewed dozens of academic producers from his book Scholarly Podcasting. Why? What?
- [04:19]
Fanny Grabinski
How?
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Robert Boynton
Among his arguments for the possibilities of academic podcasting is that, quote, it hasn't yet been consumed by the academic publishing machine of points and rankings, unquote. At this protean stage, its future can be whatever we collectively want it to be. And I think that is still true. And as someone who's always believed that ideas are too important to remain inside the academy, I too find the possibilities of academic podcasting exciting. So, as you can see in the program, we've divided the afternoon into three panels. In the first panel, we're going to introduce you to two podcasts Benjamin is producing with our first two guinea pigs, Fanny Grabinski and Mara Mills. And then Fanny is going to take us into her process and share her thoughts on her work. You will also hear some fresh clips from the project. It literally returned yesterday from Field Recordings. In the second panel, my colleagues Ellen Horn will moderate a conversation with our colleague Chenjerai Komanika, along with Barry Lam and Julia Barton, three veterans who have made a specialty of working on Creative Idea Informed Series. And then I will moderate the third panel in which Joy Connolly, Barry Lamb, and Lauren Aurora Hutchinson will discuss the ways podcasts might help the university's work in the public humanities and perhaps be acknowledged within the academy for the purposes of hiring, promoting. I think we can agree that there's never been a time when bridging the gap between the university and the public has been more important. So I hope you'll stay and talk to each other, which is the ultimate goal of this event. Thank you.
- [06:04]
Benjamin Walker
Thank you, Rob, for that and for making this happen. This is really our first stab at connecting what we're doing here at NYU with the larger conversation about what's going on at this intersection of podcasting and academia. My name is Benjamin Walker. I'm not an academic. I come to this project as a podcast maker. My path to podcasting was through public radio, and I was one of the co founders of the podcast network Radiotopia. And for the past decade, I've been producing and hosting my own podcast, which is called the Theory of everything. In 2024, I put out a 10 hour podcast group biography that was set in the 1950s. It's called Not All Propaganda is Art. And it was really something different than I'd ever made before. I visited archives all over the world. I'd spent four years researching and writing it. And that's an amount of time that most of us who make narrative podcasts just don't have the luxury of having. And so when I finished, I was humbled how much better it was because it took so long. And I found myself gravitating towards a set of people who do have a lot of time and do devote a lot of time to produce their work, academics. And that's how I came to this intersection of scholarship and podcasting. And thanks to Rob Boynton Chenjerai and others here at the NYU Journalism Program, we've launched this pilot project. And the fundamental idea is really, really simple. It's scholars doing original work in audio form. And so when we began last January, we had a number of workshops and conversations and we nailed down a few guiding principles. A podcast can have multiple forms, but for us, we're really focused on limited narrative series. So things that are a few episodes long. And secondly, we decided that we wanted to totally avoid the either or debate, and we wanted to work with scholars who are on a path to produce both a traditional peer reviewed academic work, but who are also interested in producing a limited series podcast at the same time. And there's obviously more hypotheses and ideas and questions at play, but I think the best way to talk about them is just to dive into the two projects themselves. One comes from Fanny Grabinski, a musicologist here at nyu. And since she's here, we're going to mostly focus on her project. But first, I want to tell you a little bit about the other one we're making. This one is called Tuning Time. And it's a project rooted in in about a decade of work done by Mara Mills, an associate professor of media studies and the founder of the center for Disability studies here at NYU, and Jonathan Stern, a sound studies professor from McGill. Jonathan sadly passed away last March, and so this project will not only be the culmination of the work that he was doing with Mara, but it's also going to be a memorial to him and his immense contribution to the field of sound studies. So the roots of their project is this incredible sound archive. This is like a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of it that Mara collected and digitized as part of her research into the National Federation for the Blind and Early Audiobook Technologies. She was very interested in how blind users were hacking their technology, the record players and later the tape machines to read faster. And when she realized her friend Jonathan was also interested in time stretching in media, and this is actually the roots of autotune, they started listening to their massive collection together. So Mara is not here because she's giving a lecture in Paris this week. So I asked her to record for me a description about what it was like when she and Jonathan started listening to this archive.
- [10:11]
Fanny Grabinski
A lot of the work ended up being just listening. And it meant that I and Jonathan, on our sabbaticals together, when we shared an office, we spent a lot of time listening and then chatting about them and taking notes about them, often really cracking up and laughing about them, puzzling over them. We discovered that some of the tapes had a lot to do with blind people reading books at high speed. Blind people wanting to read by ear and employ all these extensive reading practices like skimming and skipping ahead, that cited people use with print. But some of the tapes had to do with broadcasting and the broadcasting industry.
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Robert Boynton
Some had to do with experimental music
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Fanny Grabinski
by sighted people or by blind people using time stretching. The listening process made us realize just how big time stretching was.
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Benjamin Walker
So as the two of them started working with this history of time stretching, they experimented with format. This is just the first page of a PMLA journal article that they published in this bizarre two column form. They also released this pretty amazing ebook through Triple Canopy here in New York, York. And for me, looking back, these are real signposts at just how eager they were to move beyond the printed page. And so there will be a book. Jonathan and Mara have done the bulk of that work already. But this podcast gives you the opportunity to incorporate and work with this incredible sound work, which is not even just these files that they listen to. They also went and interviewed some of the innovators that worked with these technologies. So tuning time. The podcast will be a three episode miniseries and it's gonna trace these two intertwined stories, one focused on blind users and the other on musicians. It begins in the 30s when the first audiobooks, long playing records, which were called talking books, were produced for blind users. Technologies that was hacked by users like a man named Harvey Lauer, who then went on to develop important tape technologies that fed innovations used by musicians from John Cage to Parliament and informed Auto Tune as well. And Jonathan's important work on autotune will figure into this podcast. In the case of Jonathan, we have many recorded talks and seminars that he did solo with Mara as well. Obviously, Mara is going to be the primary narrator and host for this story, but we're convinced that we can make this almost a co hosted project, making sure that we find a way to have Jonathan's voice there. The plan is to get the whole three episodes finished by June. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to our other podcast producer, Fanny.
- [13:02]
Fanny Grabinski
My name is Fanny Grubensky, and first of all, thanks you all for being here at the end of the week. It's a pleasure to listen to Mara. Certainly the joy of being one of the first guinea pigs of this project is to work in close collaboration with a scholar I deeply admire and love. So Benjamin asked me to present the project before he entered it last winter. And so I'm gonna give a quick presentation and then pretend that I haven't been thinking about in terms of podcasting for a few months. So the book project, podcast project is called the Elephant in the Music Ecology Empire, and it's an attempt to investigate the history of the piano at the turn of the 20th century in the United States through the perspective of its primary materials, including ivory, wood, felt, and metal. This was a time when the piano was absolutely ubiquitous across the world and across diverse segments of societies, which means that the instrument exerted enormous pressure on communities and environments that produced its primary materials worldwide. So with this book, I'm trying to plug music and sound studies with numerous conversations in the humanities and the social sciences about extractivism, questions of ecological degradation, human exploitation. So it's a very interdisciplinary work that seeks to extend the way in which we've been thinking about music and sound so far by integrating Many more actors that were not on the map of music and sound scholars up until now. The way I described that project about a year ago when I sat with my editor, not thinking about a podcast yet, was it's going to be four main chapters each following a material wherever it leads. I promised him it was going to be a very messy book and then he'd have a lot of work to do to help me contain the narrative. The idea is to have a very expensive approach to all of these materials and the people who made them and all of the non human active forces that also made them what they are. To give you a sense of what that means following materials wherever they lead. We wanted to share with you two clips related to the woods story in which we follow Adirondack spruce, the material that was used for the construction of piano soundboards at the turn of the 20th century in the United States. The soundboard is that piece that goes in the middle of the piano and it's often called the piano's loudspeaker. It's the thing that takes the sound of the string and makes it loud so you all can hear it in a room like this one. So the acoustic questions that surround the making of this material are pretty crucial, unlike for other materials in the piano that we'll talk about later. The first clip you'll hear is from an interview we did at the Steinway factory last winter with one of the company's longest employees, Mike Moore, who started as what he calls a belly man, I. E. Someone working inside the piano making soundboards. Here he's describing his lumber stocks to Benjamin. Here's how he talked about spruce and the way it performs within piano soundboards.
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Robert Boynton
So the best soundboard spruce has the highest stiffness to weight ratio. It's very stiff along the line of the grain, but it's also very light.
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Benjamin Walker
So it's free to vibrate and eager to vibrate and eager to move the air.
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Fanny Grabinski
A good way to understand the specific qualities of a material is to see how they play out in other contexts. This led us to the Adirondack Forest, where we stumbled across another iconic spruce based technology of the turn of the 20th century in the U.S. the Adirondack guide boat, which we discussed with a boat builder named Nate while sitting on his boat in the water.
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Benjamin Walker
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
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Robert Boynton
difficult piece of wood.
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Benjamin Walker
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
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Robert Boynton
can physically make it as small as
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Benjamin Walker
possible and still retain enough strength to make a functional object that will last
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Robert Boynton
a very long time.
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Fanny Grabinski
So here we enter this circle that has important implications in terms of logging, processing, selling lumber on markets, and so on, which in turn has deeper implications for labor histories, ecological histories. So if you're looking for these very specific qualities, then you're going to look for these very specific trees and these very specific people who are able to deliver the streets and so on. So this is how this work is unfolding. So now thinking about the podcast in relation to the project. I've been trying to reflect for a minute about what we're doing these days. And at this point, there are two ways for me to think about the podcast. First, I will try to explain why make a book and a podcast. And then I will reflect on the way in which the podcast changes the way I'm writing the book. So the first reason why I'm excited to do a book and a podcast, although it takes a lot of time, is because the histories I'm telling are very much happening in the present. The stories I'm tracing 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 and roads, ponds, dams and forests as admin traces of the extractive practices that I was writing about. There's also a great deal of emotional involvement in these stories as communities are grappling with the consequences of the various trades. I'm looking at the most intense example, of course, being the extermination of elephants for making piano keys. So the project from the beginning has been a mix of history and ethnography, kind of out of necessity. The other reason why I've been combining these methodologies is because there's a lot of imbalance in the historical record when you start tracing histories of materials. While there are hundreds of boxes reflecting the strategies of big companies like Steinway and others, it's much harder to access the experiences of workers. And it's even more of a challenge to approach trees, animals and minerals as the very active forces they've been in in all of these stories. That's also why I've turned to ethnography 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 conversations, site visits, and observations that I was not really sure what to do with. I was not sure how I was going to include that in the book or if I was going to include that in the book. And so the podcast offers a great home for this sort of spillover of the research. To illustrate the resonance of the stories I'm tracing in the present and the richness of some of the relationships that have emerged because of this ethnographic approach to the stories over the course of the research, we wanted to play a short clip we recorded just this week during a visit to Ivorytown, Connecticut, the World center for the Making of Ivory for piano keys between the 1850s and the 1950s. The voice you'll hear is Ian Bassalone, a young, quote unquote emotional historian, as he calls himself, who is putting together a new museum on the site of a former ivory key factory. Ian is also involved in the C chanty community, and he sang us a song written by a friend whose family was involved in the manufacture of ivory keys.
- [21:00]
Robert Boynton
I took my living from an old mill town across the river in Ivory Town where they built pianos of world renown the 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 pachyderm's ghost 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 now the old clock tower high above the ground Kept track of more than just time of day, day hope no one here thinks glory bound for the white is stained in Ivory Town oh, weep for the loss with me now the factory's been closed a dozen years Scarcely time to dry the tears and like old snow that's been lying round the white is stained in Ivory Town O weep for the loss with me so like the whale slain for Corset Bone, the elephant's been stolen from his home in Barnum's tents He still is found for the white is stained in Ivory Town oh, weep for the loss with me.
- [23:08]
Fanny Grabinski
So how do you even go about including something like that in a book? That's the joy of having podcasts. The second reason why I'm excited to write a podcast in addition to a book is that it seems to me a medium that is particularly well suited to the telling of material histories. Of course, I'm surrounded by people who have been thinking much more than I have about the work that sound can do for us in telling the histories of these materials. So, first, it seems to me a privileged way of entering the sort of sensory, embodied experiences that we're trying to get at with these stories and let the materials speak for themselves. So to illustrate that, we wanted to listen to a clip that we recorded just this week. You'll hear the former president of a historical society in the region of Ivorytown. Again, he's talking about his feelings, slash, sensory perception of ivory as a material. Okay, so can we talk about. So these are ivory keys, right? Ivory almost exudes a warmth, you know, you can almost.
- [24:19]
Benjamin Walker
It just kind of talks to you.
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Fanny Grabinski
It just kind of talks to you?
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Benjamin Walker
Yeah, well, it does to me.
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Fanny Grabinski
What does it tell you? It just says, I'm something special.
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Robert Boynton
I'm alive.
- [24:35]
Fanny Grabinski
The second way in which I feel like podcasts can really help do work for histories of materials is that one of the challenge in trying to trace these histories is the very broad scales which we're dealing with, including deep time, of geological time, and then up all the way to the present, and also the global reach of these histories. And so it seems to me that the compressed format of podcasts, the ability to juxtapose disparate scenes, can do a lot of work in a very quick time. Now I want to think about the way in which we're not only trying to produce compelling audio, but also how trying to produce compelling audio is changing the book. First way in which our work has started changing the way I think about the project is because we've been looking for characters to embody the stories that I want to tell, and this has resulted in a demultiplication of the voices that are part of the project. I tend to work in this sort of multi dimensional way, trying to multiply the perspectives on the phenomena I'm working on, but adopting a more journalistic approach to that has ended up changing the way I've been working. I give credit to Benjamin for pursuing, you know, meeting a stranger on the street and convincing him to talk about something on the spot that's not things I normally do, and yet it is something that is changing the way I think about the project. One scene that could illustrate that is a recording of a conversation we had with someone that Benjamin casted into the podcast. She's Ian, the singer's boss. He is opening a museum in the thrift store that she has opened on the site of a former ivory key factory. Here, she explains the project. Alison Sloan, founder and CEO of Pandemonium Rainforest Project, who you hear is my Boo, who is underneath the cage down there, and he is making a little nest for me. Hi, Boo.
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Benjamin Walker
Well, hi.
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Fanny Grabinski
Hi, Boo. Hello. Hello. Back in 2021, we were very lucky to have purchased this beautiful building and be able to save it from being made into condos, or worse, torn down.
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Benjamin Walker
We knew also that we needed a
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Fanny Grabinski
place to move our thrift store, which is the revenue stream for our animal rescue. When Ian first told us about the business models, the thrift store funding the animal rescue project, I was thinking, oh, it's kind of a reverse of the situation where the elephants would support the business of making pianos. So is that also how you think about your work? It is the irony of it all, isn't it? Okay, so sort of a funny scene, but also it's sort of a deep another way for this woman of grappling with the fact that she's also related to the family company who was making ivory. So it's actually a very serious business for her to do that kind of work. The reason why this character has become important to the story is because I would meet with people, I would talk with them, but I would not record our conversations, nor would I be able to go back to them. So all of the operations that go with treating seriously the kind of audio that we're working with means that I can go back to every single encounter I have and start thinking about my writing with the words that these people have used. So the journalistic approach that we have developed for this project, you've heard that in that last clip where I'm asking an extremely pointed question. Is that part of your work, trying to make amend for what your family was doing with the elephants? We do a lot of that. Can you say that again? You said it very well. There was a truck passing by. So it's not exactly spontaneous conversations. And it's not to say we're trying to distort what people are saying, but certainly we're putting a lot of effort in trying to have people spell out in as eloquent a manner as possible what they're doing and what they care about. And this ends up turning some of our characters into what I would call lay theorists or theorists of some of the practices that I'm looking at. And just to illustrate that, I wanted to show you the first piece I've written since I've started doing the podcast. In addition to the book, this is a piece on the history of spruce. In that piece, I was thinking back to an interview that we made with the CEO of a lumber company that we met in the Adirondack region. Here I have Jeff engaged with sort of environmental theorizing of what's happening on markets in the 19th century and the standardization of commodities. And for those of you who are familiar with environmental history, like the king of environmental history, William Cronon, and the way Jeff Slifka was theorizing about what he was doing with his lumber business, that provides a counterpoint to this theory that Cronon came up with an extremely important contribution to my understanding of the whole trade. Finally, the last way in which doing podcasts changes the book is the willingness to find sound archives to include in the podcast. And here I have to give credit again to Benjamin, who is systematically asking, where are the tapes? Where are the recordings? Can we listen to them? The last clip we wanted you to listen to is a tape that we stumbled across yesterday morning in Ivorytown. It has just the name of the woman that we're gonna hear, Elda Godenzi. I've read a couple of transcripts of oral histories with workers involved in the ivory trade. I've never found a testimony by a woman, and you see how much more information comes from the recording. You hear her accent. She's from Austria. She's part of this history of European immigration to the region as part of industrialization and so on. And the interviewers are asking her questions that I'm dreaming of being able to ask to all of my dead actors all the time about this particularly sensitive episode of this series. So here she is. During all those key polishings, did you
- [30:42]
Robert Boynton
ever think about the elephants?
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Fanny Grabinski
Yes.
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Robert Boynton
You did?
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Fanny Grabinski
I did, yes.
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Benjamin Walker
Because ivory to me is so precious. I have a piece of ivory which
- [30:55]
Robert Boynton
is new, and I think that the
- [30:58]
Benjamin Walker
more I handle it, the prettier it is.
- [31:00]
Fanny Grabinski
So it made me think, good to those animals.
- [31:03]
Benjamin Walker
I wonder if they pained. I did. Of course, I'm sensitive to. And I said, what do you mean,
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Fanny Grabinski
wonder if they paint?
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Benjamin Walker
Well, if they paint when they pulled these tusks off of them and how they did it. Someday I'm going To find out how
- [31:17]
Robert Boynton
they pulled them off of the elephant.
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Fanny Grabinski
That's what I would like to know. It wasn't easy.
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Robert Boynton
It wasn't easy.
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Benjamin Walker
I bet that was something, huh? Oh, yeah, yeah.
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Robert Boynton
But.
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Fanny Grabinski
But the animals died after that, didn't they? Usually before.
- [31:31]
Robert Boynton
Usually before.
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Fanny Grabinski
Oh, didn't they die before they told the truth?
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Benjamin Walker
Oh, gee, that's awful.
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Robert Boynton
It's a heck of a heck of a deal.
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Fanny Grabinski
It really is.
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Robert Boynton
Did you talk amongst the girls there,
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Fanny Grabinski
did you talk about elephants? No. And such?
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Benjamin Walker
No. We were fun.
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Fanny Grabinski
We were fun buds.
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Benjamin Walker
So, yeah, we found that yesterday just in a box. She was like 90 when she was interviewed in the 80s, and she had worked in the key polishing as a polisher. And one of the things we've been talking about all week is this refusal to sort of know the history. And I found that very odd. And to hear this woman who was there also, and she said, I want to find that out one day. I mean, we just found this yesterday, so we're still kind of not sure what to make of it. Thank you, Fanny. It's so much fun working with you on this, and it's a real honor to sort of be on the ground floor of seeing how you're processing this in real time. So this will be four episodes. We also plan to be done in June, and that's the gist of it, but we have some more time.
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Robert Boynton
Thank you.
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Benjamin Walker
I think it's wonderful what you're.
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Robert Boynton
What you're doing here. I have a question about writing, because academic texts tend to be argument driven and podcasts, narrative podcasts in particular, tend to be story driven. And I'm wondering, in your writing process, how do you reflect on both of those polls and integrate it into how you produce the text but also produce the audio?
- [33:05]
Fanny Grabinski
The true answer is I'm not really sure yet because I'm going to start writing. We're doing a lot of recordings now. Some of them are real kind of primary fieldwork, like the Adirondacks trip we took a couple weeks ago. Some are kind of revisiting grounds that I already know. So we're not staging scenes, but we're having conversations that I've had a version of previously, and we're doing that more for the audios. But I'm starting to think about what other clips I would like to have in that vicinity, what comments I would make. But I can't pretend that I have a big narrative arch in my head yet. And I'm a little bit intimidated about. To be honest, for academics, storytelling is the thing that we all kind of aspire to, and sometimes we're not the best because we also have to do all of the other things. We also have to include theoretical conversation and everything. So it's sometimes hard to make it a pretty story that's also pleasant to read. But I'm excited also knowing that this serious examination of the historiography in light of what I'm trying to say will happen somewhere else, and I don't have to bore listeners with all of that in the same place. Is exciting. Thanks. This sounds super interesting. And I live in Astoria, Queen, so in the land that Steinway wrought. So I'm very interested to hear. I wanted to ask you about archives and access to the archives. I worked on a podcast called Urban Roots where we did a lot of oral histories with folks generally in marginalized communities. And we relied very heavily on the oral histories because there was so little in the archives. We would always dig, we'd always look, but historically there wasn't much interest. Right. In these communities, like you mentioned as well, and the folks that you're talking to. One thing we grappled with a lot is how do we make the oral histories accessible, usable, back to the community who we're interviewing with. Our pseudo solution was partnering with libraries and see if they would hold the archives for us. But we never really came up with a grand answer to this. And I'm curious if that's something you're thinking about, maybe not necessarily for the communities that you're speaking with, but perhaps for future scholarship, how you're going to hold on to these archives and make them usable in the future. That's something I'm starting to think about now, realizing that we are producing an archive. And of course, as a historian, I'm obsessed with archives. The way I've been thinking about that now is really a sort of an exchange, you know, I had. And there is always, you know, historians work relies so enormously on the work and the knowledge of curators that then barely appear in and everything here, because it's so much a conversation with people who are taking care of these collections and archives. They will send me things, and then I'm sending them what I've done. And so there's this idea that they're also very interested in knowledge production, not to write, but because it's about their community and their history. So I don't have an answer, but I think it's a very important question.
- [35:58]
Benjamin Walker
It also points in the direction of who are these for? Which is another big question. Mark, as I mentioned at the beginning, there are some big questions at the heart of this, too, and I feel like coming from the podcast side, where when we make something, we're just kind of thinking of the audience as an amorphous everybody. And I feel one of the most exciting things about working with Fanny and Mara is that we've been kind of conceiving these with a particular constituency in mind first. And this is something that came up in some of the conversations we had last winter when we were piloting. The idea is that for the musicology community, there's a way to target this first. And obviously, I think both of these themes have appealed to general audiences, but the success would be targeting the communities, the material studies for music studies, sound studies, that are already engaged with the issues Fanny is exploring in her work, starting there and then maybe branching out. So we've imagined the release of both of these as targeted release parties. Maybe not so much aimed at a general podcast audience, but really honing in on what the best, most receptive audience would be and connected to big conferences for your colleagues and peers. And the same with Mara, and then how we also reach the Ivoryton people who will be interested in in this as well. We're still at the beginning of that. I'd be curious to hear about how others are thinking about that who have come together today.
- [37:36]
Robert Boynton
Thank you so much. I am going to get the book, listen to the podcast. I'm going to get if there's a tote bag. So it sounds great. I'm in for both of the projects. And it's with a lot of modesty that I ask this question, because I can only write books and I would love to have this kind of support and doing what you're doing. So I'm sort of where you were before this. I'm curious about the origin of this project and is there any sense that it's 2025? Where's my jetpack? Why are we still doing a book and a podcast and not a thing that's both? And again, I'm not doing that. The closest I've come is there have been some books where I've included some sound clips that you need to scan. Just we're so primitive. And it's not because academic books are doing so great, and most of the journals, nobody wants the hard copy, so we're already reading these things online. I guess I'm just curious because you came up with this pilot last year and it's brilliant. And I just sort of wonder, is the pilot 2.0. Is anyone here imagining a version of this where we're looking and listening and reading?
- [38:50]
Benjamin Walker
One thing I think these conversations are such a big part of the next two panels, and you're going to hear some people who are really thinking about that. For me, coming from the podcast side, I really think talking about these things, it's hard for me to get my brain around it without the work itself. So piloting this idea forward just had to be about actually collaborating with scholars and making podcasts that we could say this is it, to hear how precise Fanny is about some of these concepts. We talk about things like ethnography and journalism and academic work a lot. Those abstract conversations are just not as meaningful for when she can sort of walk you through the process. And so I think having these two podcasts will contribute to these bigger conversations. But those are bigger conversations that you're going to hear some. Some very serious people talking about later.
- [39:46]
Robert Boynton
I have a conjecture and a question. The first relates to the podcast and its status as an argument versus maybe something more immersive, more ambient, more, I don't know, maybe even sort of rapturous. And it strikes me that analogy might be the shift from the focus amongst filmmakers with documentary mode to that of a film essay, where the essayistic becomes a place of exploration, of drift, not necessarily following a kind of teleological argument, but creating a kind of mood space where the audience can figure out where they're going to wander around in it. There's lots of examples. Historically, people like Glenn Gold with the idea of North Delia Darb shows the dreams going back to the 60s work of Mark Fisher. So it's already prior history that we can go back to. But I also must reflect on how friends of mine listen to podcasts, which is that they listen to it via AI. They get the AI to listen to the podcast and then produce a one sheet. So as much as we're thinking about output and how to think about narrative, voice and creativity, I wonder to what extent we should also be thinking about how to create listeners. Listeners who actually go along for the ride. Listeners who are interested in the self reflective act of listening, who are almost kind of Bartesian listeners, rather than just kind of reducing it to a kind of doggy bag take home.
- [41:21]
Fanny Grabinski
Well, I don't have a very compelling answer, except it's going to be hard to get a clean doggy bag with our podcast. We're making it as hard as possible. I've never heard of that. Listening. AI listening.
- [41:35]
Benjamin Walker
Yeah, well, I have my AI that's going to take that one sheet and turn it back into a podcast? No, but I find especially with Fanny's as she's on this journey with these materials, I mean, we end up on boats. The meanderingness of thinking about these materials in a material form of audio. I think this one's going to appeal to some listening that all the examples you're bringing up would almost fit into. But I would say Mara and Jonathan's too. I think that the way that they were frustrated, they didn't want to make a sort of a. An article with buttons that you would just push and listen to the things. In fact, Mara and I have been having a lot of conversations that sort of the hackers at the core of the story, either the experimental musicians or the blind users hacking their record player to make it go faster that they were. In a way that something that can be really foregrounded in this podcast through conversations and interviews is an incredible individual named Andy Slater, who grew up an unsighted experimental music maker. There's a crossover in foregrounding these characters who are in the present and similar to Fanny's work, may have passed on who were working in the 30s and 40s, but there's a way of accessing this that a paper with buttons just would never pull off.
- [42:52]
Fanny Grabinski
First of all, I'll just say that I know that your target audience is academics, but as a non academic who's quite interested in environmental history, I would totally listen to this. And that sounds really incredible.
- [43:02]
Benjamin Walker
First target audience. I mean, we're not. We're not, we're not.
- [43:05]
Fanny Grabinski
I'm thinking about how coming from the podcast side myself, if your first audience is an academic audience, there are lots of podcasts out there that exist that are very bare bones production, that are people essentially giving a lecture that people who are specifically incredibly interested in the topic and specialize in the topic would listen to regardless of audio quality. And so as someone who's in a position to be making pitches to try to say no, having that aesthetic, that essayistic, that artistic element included in this scholarship is actually really central to what we're doing. How do you make that case to people who might be more skeptical, who think, okay, great, give the academic a microphone and have them read their book. Like there is a book and an audio format. It's an audio book. We have this. It's like someone just reading their print. So what is the aesthetic argument when you're making to try to get especially resources in an academic setting?
- [43:57]
Benjamin Walker
I think some of the folks here Today are going to be addressing that. I'm hoping the works that we're going to do, these two podcasts will help make individuals like yourself be able to make arguments like that. But I don't have an answer to how to get over that yet. Coming from the.
- [44:12]
Robert Boynton
The academic side and really not knowing much about podcasts at all, Ask what
- [44:17]
Fanny Grabinski
I hope isn't an offensively basic question,
- [44:20]
Robert Boynton
but I think it does have to do with the question of where this fits in the academic ecosystem, which I know we're coming on to later. And my question is, how are these archived? Are they part of the library system? Are they searchable? And then how do you deal with the fact that as opposed. And I say this as a supporter, I don't want to sound at all critical. I'm just really. I think it's so important to understand the form more carefully, more. More intimately, because the mechanisms of the.
- [44:48]
Fanny Grabinski
The pdfable are so well known to us.
- [44:51]
Benjamin Walker
You know, the article in the book,
- [44:52]
Robert Boynton
and like, I see a footnote, I
- [44:54]
Fanny Grabinski
know how to follow it up.
- [44:55]
Robert Boynton
But how does that kind of citation work in a podcast?
- [45:00]
Fanny Grabinski
Yeah, that's a super important question. And when I say it's kind of a relief to sometimes feel like, oh, you don't have to give the history of this concept and how I engage with it or something, it doesn't mean that we're not trying to make our sources traceable to listeners. I think Benjamin has a specific answer because of what he did for his work. I don't think that's what we necessarily intend to do, and we'll see how it plays in the writing process. I personally adore listening to moments when people open archival boxes and talk a lot about the materiality of the archive. So my inclination would be to have a lot of these moments, but more than knowing, this is Collection XYZ at this institution. But also, why is this thing here? Why does it matter? Like, how many people have put their hands on these documents before we did and why and so on. I think for every sort of source that you would have, as in a book like, now I'm talking about this thing and I'm drawing information from this. This will be presented as such, like, we're sitting in this archival room with, you know, curator Blah. And here is where this piece comes from. The other exciting thing for me about this project is to be able to really give credit to the inner scholarly conversations, the readings that have really informed the way I think about this. And now the scholars will be on the show talking about their ideas and tell them in their own terms. There's going to be a lot of characters in each episode. So certainly I think it's really doing some of the work of foregrounding the various scholarly voices who have been working on these topics before.
- [46:32]
Benjamin Walker
Also, the doing both hopefully gets at that because I think it's not there. So I mentioned I came to this from making this nine hour group biography. There are a few things that I kind of broke. I moved the story in some ways that, you know, I someone pointed out to me like, well, where's the book? Unfortunately, in our ecosystem, it doesn't matter. Eventually we're going to figure this out. But the fact that there's a book attached, there's a way to get at the core. But I'm hoping the smart folks in charge are going to figure this out soon.
- [47:03]
Fanny Grabinski
It's also the same question about how do you make this archive you produce available? And I just wanted to give a compliment to that which is Mara's and Jonathan's sources are partly published on a database that I created where maybe I'm thinking as I'm listening to your questions and thanks for these questions, maybe I could also consider publishing. So it's called Sound and Science Digital Histories. It's a database that publishes sources on the history of acoustics. It's been our solution. Mara published a book where you can flash a QR code and access companion pages on this database. I'm about to publish a book that has the same feature. Again, not ideal, but like our solutions are far also to provide, you know, resources for our colleagues who want to teach on the topics that we've been researching. So yeah, everyone is in this room, I guess, scratching their heads about this.
- [47:53]
Benjamin Walker
I know that you mentioned that you haven't really started writing yet, but this is related to that because if you think about publishing an academic work, you're going to make sure that you've dotted all your eyes and made sure that everything is tip top shape. Whereas with podcasting, I guess that even if you're doing a narrative series, you
- [48:09]
Robert Boynton
can kind of let the scene show more.
- [48:11]
Benjamin Walker
You can show your thinking.
- [48:13]
Robert Boynton
Do you think that that will just
- [48:14]
Fanny Grabinski
make you feel insecure in some ways?
- [48:15]
Benjamin Walker
Like, how do you deal with that,
- [48:16]
Fanny Grabinski
showing the process in some ways instead of just making sure that this is the finished product that you're looking at or listening at? That's a great question because I think as we're recording, right, we are doing the research. So the results, the clips we're going to have to work with. We are on the moment. We don't have all of the answers. And in fact, the process of recording these things that are going to be part of the final product is taking us hopefully where we want to be in a few months. That's a conversation we have how much it's going to be about the search. And again, thinking, okay, the book will have this more short, scholarly tone. Not that you have to say in your book, have all of the answers. I think it's also fine to say that, you know, some things are unresolved, but. But that's a very important tension to have in mind for sure.
- [49:05]
Benjamin Walker
I would say, though, that both Fanny and Mara, there may be some scenes showing that all the T's will be crossed and all the I's are going to be dotted. It's not like, oh, this is a podcast, so I don't have to do this. Like, that's. In fact, I've heard now that this more and more and more. So the opposite.
- [49:21]
Fanny Grabinski
First of all, I've never heard of this process where the podcast and the book are being reported at the same time, which is really exciting. And it was interesting to hear, Fanny, how that changed your interview process when you were talking about characters as theorists and asking questions in a different way. I'm curious if you think that is an interview style you might use again, even if it's just for a book and not a podcast. And I'm also curious on the other
- [49:46]
Robert Boynton
side, Benjamin, you talked a lot about
- [49:49]
Fanny Grabinski
Fanny's process changing to accommodate the podcast. As an audio producer myself, I'm curious, Benjamin, if your process has changed from how you might produce a podcast because you're working in this way.
- [50:01]
Benjamin Walker
Starts, we can end with Fanny, but I would say that, yeah, it's just made me feel like, wow, I thought I was serious before. Also, I mean, my questions may be inarticulate and it didn't matter because I was going to cut that and I was going to use the tape. And working with someone who every word counts, I would say that we can learn a lot from the scholars as much as they can learn from us. So I'll just leave it at that.
- [50:29]
Fanny Grabinski
No, I don't think so. There are distinguished ethnographers in the room, and I am a 19th century historian by training. And so my world is really the written word. Like the archives. It was already sort of a. A new thing to have. But, you know, just following things where they are, like looking at these buildings and this forest and the things and having to deal with that. So I really didn't know what I was doing. I mean, I was talking with people and learning so much and then scribbling some notes and be like, oh, my God, you know, what am I going to do with that? And then. But certainly influenced the way I was thinking. But what I'm excited about is to be able to actually seriously think about that. It's like, I've had this informal conversation with this incredibly generous person who took me on a tour of their town and explained all these things to me, and now it's not just in my head and, like, part of the. Something that helped me read historical documents and books in a better way, but they're becoming characters of the stories.
- [51:25]
Benjamin Walker
All right. Thank you so much for all these great questions.