I Sympose So: An SSI Reflection

amplabuncategorized

Sound scholars and members of the SpokenWeb team from across Canada (and the globe) got together at Concordia University in Montreal this May for the two-day Symposium followed immediately by a three-day SpokenWeb Sound Institute. I was fortunate to attend both, and it was a whirlwind.

I would define my first SpokenWeb Symposium as conjunctive, inspiring, and maybe even a little overwhelming.

Highlights are so many, they are hard to nail down. For me, they include my mini-podcast chat with Katherine McLeod, the group visit to the Musee des Ondes Emile Berliner (a museum dedicated to the first and largest Gramophone factory in Canada!) and, selfishly, my panel during the “Sonic Memories” portion of the symposium. With me on the Sonic Memories panel were session chair Annie Murray (University of Calgary) and co-panelist Linara Kolosov (Simon Fraser University).

 

Image of a portion of the waveform of an archival sound object that has undergone a Vocoder Amplification and Vocal Removal to maintain privacy for a particular subject. This example of a Feminist Edit was created by Sarah Cipes using Audacity for her presentation of “Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as Feminist Practice in Literary Archives” at the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium.
Image of a portion of the waveform of an archival sound object that has undergone a Vocoder Amplification and Vocal Removal to maintain privacy for a particular subject. This example of a Feminist Edit was created by Sarah Cipes using Audacity for her presentation of “Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as Feminist Practice in Literary Archives” at the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium.

My talk focused on different types of feminist edits that I created for the use of audio recordings in archives. These edits were contextualized through collective research done by Drs. Karis Shearer, Deanna Fong and myself, and will be explained more deeply in a work that we are co-authoring regarding feminist consent in the archives.

This was my first conference panel, and I am so grateful to the generous folks who came out to take part. The audience listened with care and the question period that followed allowed me to come to think about my own work processes in ways that I might not otherwise have done. Even long, tangential comments were appreciated because they expressed the nuanced and intuitive aspects of archival work that are known but infrequently discussed. Like many archivists, I prefer to work alone, but the illuminating discussion with my fellow SpokenWeb members and conference attendees has left me awaiting the next SpokenWeb Symposium with much anticipation!

 

Sarah Cipes is a PhD student in the Digital Arts & Humanities IGS Theme at UBCO. She is also the PRC Fellow in the AMP Lab and is working with Karis Shearer on feminist approaches to collection processing and editing in the sound archive.