I’ve just returned from a wonderful conference at UCLA called “Inertia: A Conference on Sound, Media, and the Digital Humanities,” organized by Mike D’Errico and company. On Friday, I presented the notion of “algorithmic listening” (i.e., the practice of listening to algorithms that listen) and its application in the context of my development of Susurrant.
I greatly enjoyed hearing about the HiPSTAS platform (High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship) from its PI Tanya Clement, along with colleagues Marit MacArthur and Eric Rettberg. The approach of that platform is quite different in some respects, and each of their projects gave me a great deal to think about in terms of the kinds of questions that other scholars hope to address using such tools.
I’m grateful for the generous and welcoming audience at UCLA, and for the diversity of approaches and ideas I encountered there. I look forward to presenting my work in revised form at the Global Digital Humanities conference in Sydney this July.