Patrick Grady O’Malley

Editing raw sound files in order to contribute to a cohesive project such as a complete audiobook was very fun and fulfilling. My role was largely taking everyone’s individual reading files and putting them together into one large, usable piece. This was a bit cumbersome as there were many different files, as well as some retakes that needed to replace other bits of audio already recorded. This entire process jogged my memory rather quickly on the ins and outs of using Audacity successfully. It has been a long time since I used that software, so there was a rather steep re-learning curve, but once I got used to what I was working with, the how to’s of usage came back rather quickly.

As I mentioned, I was more in charge of putting the files together to flow nicely, I had less creative decisions than say Kat who was more in charge of putting effects within the sound. However, I still had to come up with some executive decisions on my own. These included how long certain pauses were between paragraphs, how loud or quiet to adjust the volume and getting the fades right that we used to transition between readers.

We all agreed we wanted our audiobook to be as experiential as possible. In order to do this, we felt like we needed our book to come off a little quirky and unique, and I tried reflecting this spirit in the way I spliced and added audio files to one another. The readers did a great job in staying true to the essence of our project and also Melville’s story. My job was to see their (the readers) commitment to the well-being of the project was not lost and that the sound reflected the readers distinctive styles of storytelling.

I felt we challenged the notion of providing a “Reading” and a “reading” experience that Rubery distinctly defines [61]. Since we wanted our book to be experiential, it had the qualities of a public “Reading” in that we hoped the user felt like our readers were almost performing the text. However, it is still a private, “reading” experience. Hearingthe text brings Bartleby new life, and it was fun to consider the ways I could alter that as I manipulated the sound files to make our project consistent with itself. It is my belief that the digital voice we left behind is there exclusively for the reader to encounter Bartleby and his world.

“Voice characterization” was something to listen for while editing. This helped me choose when to start a certain passage or how quickly to make a conversation begin and end. Thankfully, the readers were very creative with how they presented themselves in the reading, so editing their files was very meaningful. The narrator of the story’s voice was always distinct, especially in comparison to the other characters, so it was especially enjoyable playing around with how he came off.

Overall, this was a great collaborative project. Everyone worked really hard and I think our finished product is something we can all be proud of.

Face Cry Robot Artificial Intelligence Sad Woman https://www.maxpixel.net/Face-Cry-Robot-Artificial-Intelligence-Sad-Woman-3010309

I was not expecting that we’d actually complete the entire audiobook rendering of Bartleby in two week’s time with just short class meetings to discuss our strategy and each of us having demanding jobs and difficulty working on the project on the same days, but like Jenna, Travis, and our other group mates, I am proud of the accomplishment.  Although our audiobook might not sell for top dollar on Audible, it might definitely get a listen (or two) on librivox!

To give you an idea of where we started, after class on September 13, we drafted this document to organize our thoughts.  It’s evolved since the original creation, and we did our best to contain our thoughts to the doc, but we often veered into long email strings of conversations (continuing even as I write this blog post), going back and forth about creative ideas and varying interpretations and directions we should take the audiobook in.

As the online conversation and email correspondence was not getting us any closer to important decisions, we decided to meet before last week’s class (in the new MADH lounge) in person to discuss and finalize our strategy for rendering the audiobook.  It took us one more meeting after class to finalize our strategy.  There were still some creative back and forth, but we were able to settle on a division of labor:

• Travis would mark up the script and color code the different voices/characters in the text (in addition to drafting the presentation) so that
• Lauren could make a text to speech rendering of each character’s voice (using Mac’s accessibility functions) and then pass on the files to
• Lisa who would string them all together using Audacity, but who would also get human read files from
• Jenna (Bartleby’s voice was intentionally left as a human voice) & Sabina (who would identify parts of the text where the character’s humanity outweighed their inhumanity).  The final edit would be completed by Sabina which included the human voice overs and other sound effects.
• Jenna & Travis were the point group members for working on the presentation and for keeping us all on track!

Creatively, we decided to “read” the text using a text to speech approach where all the voices of characters, except Bartleby, were rendered as female robot voices (Jenna narrated Bartleby).  As Lisa pointed out in her post, we were interested in a feminist approach to the text which, for me, has been inspired by a heavy load of reading texts authored by men and written about men (mostly) in addition to being in a collaborative group with a majority of women.  Also, I remember discovering in the ITP Core I course last fall that most of the automated voices used on our devices (GPS, Siri, Alexa, etc.) are female which may have evolved from the traditional role women played in assisting with administrative tasks over the last century.  We also had lots and lots of discussion about the humanity and inhumanity of the characters and our various interpretations.

I am new to reading texts closely like this.  My relationship to reading has mostly been for enjoyment where I find pleasure in the stories authors tell.  I’m still grappling with the interpretations of the text, but have found our in class discussions enlightening.  Rendering the text as an audiobook has provided me with an opportunity to think non-traditionally about reading and the mere experience of enjoying the material.  As a group, we had to impose interpretation of the text and represent that interpretation which has been manifested as a somewhat techno feminist approach.  Nonetheless, we all agreed that we also wanted to represent the many varied interpretations of the character’s humanity, so we experimented with both machine and human read voices.  I’m impressed with the quality of our accomplishments, but there may be a few moments where the interspersion of the audio files may not run so smoothly.  As a group, we created over 100 separate audio files that needed to be edited together!  Quite a task, but maybe in future iterations of this course and this assignment, students can be given another week perhaps or be asked to submit a more polished version at the end of the semester.

Finally, I’ll conclude with saying that with our audiobook, it’s also quite interesting to hear the machine readings of the text.  For our previous audiobook assignment, it was important to me to find a book that was read by the author so that I could hear their voice and their interpretation of the text.  With our version of Bartleby, the automated and human read voices do not match the voices in my head of the character’s!  Nevertheless, that’s part of the interesting nature of audiobooks which Matthew Rubery has discussed in his writing: Canned Lit After Edison & Play It Again, Sam Weller.  I also don’t think I could regularly rely on being read to from a robot voice.  Despite there being a few different voice options, hearing the robot over and over might drive me a little mad and if I had to read texts this way, I might just have to say “I would prefer not to.”

After last week’s work, I had begun to agree with Rubery that audiobooks had the power to turn us all into listeners. Turns out Rubery might be right about the their second capacity as well: to turn more of us into narrators. While listening brought the text from the page to me, creating an audiobook brought me back to the page, deep into the page.

As our group prepped for project, the mere act of imagining the audio brought out elements of Melville’s text that I’d missed such as frequent alliteration and hilarious slapstick. Our attention was largely on Bartleby himself—how we might represent him as both passive and powerful. Our idea of layering additional narrators to his spoken lines as the story went on seemed both promising and wonderfully menacing, especially when he is ultimately silenced in the Tombs.

But, treating the text as a script and re-recording passages forced me to explore more profound possibilities. I found myself (I hope) doing what both Liu and Rubery had described as co-authoring—interpreting to offer something new.

For example, the story seems, by virtue of its title and eponymous, enigmatic character, really about Bartleby. And given our class discussion of parallels between Bartleby’s occupation and Melville’s life, that reading makes sense. As the oldest and weariest of our group, I’d volunteered for the first two and last eight pages–the times when the narrator himself is his oldest or weariest. In those pages, I found equally significant the disintegration of the narrator—of big business—in the face of Bartleby’s unmoving movement. Melville’s punctuation and fragmented sentences suggested an almost dissociative disorder besetting the narrator on page 27—a Poe-esque one—as he argues darkly with his own conscience and desire. Trying to voice that split, that unraveling, I felt the fever brought on by the what the narrator subconsciously sees as the contagious disease of Bartleby’s passive defiance—one fatal to an industry reliant on unthinking workers—which explains the absolute and dark necessity, in the narrator’s mind, to cure himself of the scrivener.

The dissociation became so intense (and I used GarageBand effects to capture the internal voices) that I entertained for a moment whether Bartleby was even real. I thought perhaps he may be a projection of the narrator’s psyche—a freedom he longed for in himself that he externalized and then murdered through neglect to protect the comfortable life of ease to which he had grown accustomed. (Farfetched, yes, but fun to kick around.)

That reading brought the truly baffling last two lines into greater clarity: they seem to be the reconciling of the dissociative mind. “Ah Bartleby!” the narrator cries just after blaming the Dead Letter Office for what seemed the scrivener’s predestined course for death—a course that, if truly predestined, removes the narrator from all culpability. “Ah humanity!” he adds, ruing the state of the very world that he feeds and that feeds him financially and necessarily sends all unproductive fluff to the flames.

While I value a recording that strives to be faithful to the text, this experience made me long for time to play around, like a jazz musician with a riff, to see what else “Bartleby” might yield—to try exaggerating the humor, to imagine Bartleby’s inner monologue, to see the story from Nippers’ or Turkey’s eyes. Ah the due date! Ah full time jobs!

I’m writing some of this host with this speech to text app in my excess ability settings on my computer. Since we worked with text to speech applications to render the voices in Bartleby the scrivener, I thought it would be interesting to try things the other way around.  I’ve never used speech to text before, just as I’ve never edited a few dozen audio clips together and end to end until this past week. Composing sentences in my mind first is much more difficult and composing them on a keyboard karma which in it, which enables me not only to correct mistakes, but to work with the language in a nonlinear way, and this seems to be the way my mind works with the language most of the time  Amo G

Okay, this is becoming too difficult and time consuming.

Just as the experiment of “writing” with my voice forced me to shift my approach to composing with language, our group experiment, using text-to-speech for every character but Bartleby, forced me to listen differently and to think about how voice shapes a reader’s perceptions, not only of character but of an entire story. Removing the expected reshuffled the story thematically; it produced effects/affects that more conventional strategies might not achieved for an audiobook listener; and it caused me to be more open-minded about robots. The following ramble touches on some of the aforementioned:

These days speech-to-text/text-to-speech most often brings to mind the “accessibility features” I was just playing with: tools to make both two-way communication and/or reading easier for some people unable to speak, see, or manipulate a physical text. But speech-to-text was once primarily a tool used in modern business practices—dictation. The “boss” spoke into a machine and a secretary—a copyist of sorts who was the human mechanism for rendering speech to text—listened to it and typed it out. In the 20^th century, the clerical workforce primarily comprised of women.* Without consulting any sources I’ll go way out on a limb and suggest that women still make up a large percentage of the white-collar workforce that is not “middle management” or above. Women added a gender differential to the workplace, and the way we perceive, define, and differentiate labor was forever changed. Automation is a form of apparently “workerless” labor; now that it surrounds us, could it be that the way we conceive of it is obliquely but intrinsically connected to the way we understand gender? Siri and Alexa, for example, have been discussed in this respect. (It’s also been argued that some voices are shown to affect listeners in a more optimal way than others, which is supposedly why people prefer women’s voices on their GPS.)

As we know, when Melville wrote Bartleby, the office worker and the copyist were traditionally male roles—women had not yet entered the public sphere as white-collar workers. It follows then that Bartleby, as both scrivener and refusenik, was rendered from the get-go as a rather robotic individual in every way, someone who becomes increasingly sapped of a humanity the narrator laments—or fears for?—in the final sentence. Ironically, this loss of humanity is also what seems to accelerate (or at least coincides with) his loss of functionality as a copying machine. Conversely, we like Siri and Alexa because they have the amazing functions of a machine, yet sound sort of human. (Although personally I can’t stand the sassy tone of the UPS lady.) Could it be that, in order for the world (as we know it) to work, robotic and  humanistic elements must coexist in our machines somehow? In us? I don’t think Melville had the cyborg in mind, but N. Katherine Hayles might agree. Marx might not approve.

Our group chose to use a chorus of female automatons for our version of Bartleby. This was in large part an effort to work against the text, this time to turn the entirely male world of the narrative inside out. One thing that occurred to me as I discussed this with Lauren, just before she began converting the text to speech, is that this approach also turns a typical feminist reading on its head. Not only were all the human characters rendered as robots and the most robotlike character rendered as human, but women occupied roles both of labor and power over labor. They were running the machine.

These three shifts in perspective produced a very alien/alienating experience of the story– but in a good way.  As other people have noted, listening accentuated aspects of the narrative that might have slipped by more easily in an unvoiced text. Listening to a text-to-speech rendering, with all of its imperfections, tone-deaf pronunciations, and incorrect “translations,” highlighted Melville’s language choices and the way we hear “authority” and force in individual words and phrases that could just as easily be deemphasized by “wrong” speech. Voices with the barest hint of emotion—as well as those with non-“English” accents—actually brought out the humor in the story, even in the mundane interactions of minor characters.

Not only did the humor become clearer to me, but oddly enough, so did the idiosyncrasies of Melville’s characters.  In many ways, Bartleby is the least sympathetic character, if only because he is the most thinly written character. There’s just not much of him there at all, which is part of the point. Although the narrator’s empathy was something our group had debated, and which drove us to make some unusual post-production choices, as a female robot, the narrator actually seemed a little more human to me. They all did. Melville’s characters are flawed and interesting, because humans are flawed and interesting.  Listening to the clips of “tape” I was ham-fistedly editing together, I found myself sympathizing more with these alien voices.  Forced to act out Bartleby the Scrivener, they resembled machines that were putting on a play, on the verge of manifesting human traits, but just shy of the kind of emotional capacity we believe draws a line between them and us.

* I’m thinking ahead to fantasy scene in Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” (1945):

At a recent World Fair a machine called a Voder was shown. A girl stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech. No human vocal chords entered into the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined some electrically produced vibrations and passed these on to a loud-speaker. In the Bell Laboratories there is the converse of this machine, called a Vocoder. The loudspeaker is replaced by a microphone, which picks up sound. Speak to it, and the corresponding keys move. This may be one element of the postulated system.

The other element is found in the stenotype, that somewhat disconcerting device encountered usually at public meetings. A girl strokes its keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it emerges a typed strip which records in a phonetically simplified language a record of what the speaker is supposed to have said. Later this strip is retyped into ordinary language, for in its nascent form it is intelligible only to the initiated. Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked to.

At the beginning of our foray into the world of audio-books, I was concerned about the possibility of limiting interpretations of the text. Reading about Dicken’s audience and its reaction to his voicing of Sam Weller in Rubery’s piece, I saw the inkling of an issue posed by the medium: by providing a definitive voice through an audio ‘reading,’ a text risked losing aspects of the ambiguity that fosters criticism. It seemed rather monoglotic, privileging a select set of voices over the multiple ones an audience provides in solitary reading.

Now, with our projects coming to completion, I admit that this hesitancy was rather unfair. If anything, our work on audio-books only exposed the sheer vibrancy of language and ambiguity at play in a text. Consider my role as scrip preparer. Going through the novella to color-code individual character voices in order to aid recording, I realized that my task was consequently making the text’s internal dialogism more explicit. With each character voice symbolized by a color, I could simply glance through the text and understand how narrative voice was being challenged in dominance by noting how its symbolic blue was fragmenting into a rainbow of color – coincidentally in tandem with Bartleby’s increasing obstinateness. Sharing this script with my fellow group members, I saw the text further fragmented as dubbings were inserted so as to expose elements of humanity that contrasted with the automated recording we used as a base. Thus, not only could one see external challenges to narrative voice develop but internal alterations of the character could be visually manifested.

Of even greater interest was what the audio-book added to the text. An issue that impeded our work was deciding on how to ‘read’ our audio-book. Each group member had their own understanding of the text and we wanted to ensure that the project retained a collaborative nature that could accommodate this. However, as literary interpretation is a holistic phenomenon, we could not merely pick and choose which readings remained by mass agreement: the result would be schizophrenic. Rather, we had to decide on a format that allowed individual readings to prevail while also allowing them to yield to a holistic reading. That is, our individuals readings generated an alternate reading due to the demands of the audio-book itself.

This result reveals a flaw in my thinking about audio-books: I concentrated on the interpretation of the product, not the process. As in any collaborative activity, the audio-book involved a ‘circuit’ that incorporated multiple ideas and thoughts into the media artifact by sheer consequence of production. Having the opportunity to participate in this circuit, I feel as if my understanding of the authorial role, regardless of medium, has been altered. Where I considered the author as an ‘arranger’ of the language and ideas of his society, I now question whether he is better understood as a ‘negotiator’, developing techniques and forms to best accommodate all ideas that mediate through him.

In thinking of our upcoming audiobook assignment, I was most struck by Mathew Rubery’s “Play it Again, Sam Weller: New Digital Audiobooks and Old Ways of Reading” reading for this week. Particularly, I am most interested in his notion of “cumbersome formats” (63) and how the notion of the audiobook has gained momentum with technological advances and the elimination of cassette and disk form audiobooks. Despite the small gains in the usage of audiobooks Rubery states that “… while relatively small in comparison with conventional book sales, (audiobooks) still account for a substantial number of readers as well as an upward trajectory. As the number of overal readers continues to decline, audiobook use is among the minority of reading continues to decline, audiobook use is among the minority of reading practices found to be increasing general literacy.” (63) It is fascinating to think that the increase of audiobook use comes down to more about convenience in an advancing technological world, versus reshaping how literature is absorbed or documented. Rubery describes the Victorian era ideal of the novel as a “..’talking book’, capable of preserving the voices of eminent Victorians” which now seems so far-fetched to the current reality of audiobook use. When I imagine the average person purchasing an audiobook off their phone I imagine it as an alternative to having to swipe page by page while commuting on the train/bus and listening to the book to tune out the hectic noises of daily life. In college, any audiobook I may have purchased was also out of more convenience or frankly laziness to to want to have a more passive experience of absorbing knowledge that required minimal following of texts on a line by line basis.

This generalized notion of the purpose of the audiobook however, goes entirely against my own exposure to audiobooks during my adolescence.  This group assignment has been a wonderful opportunity to re-engage with a series of audiobooks my mother created with me about 19 years ago of The Royal Raven by Hans Wilhem and The House on the Hill by Christin Couture, at around the age of 6 when I was learning how to read. With only a cassette player, tapes, and a recorder my mother thought it would be a sort of time-capsule/motivating project to inspire me to read knowing that my words would be documented to listen back to in adulthood. I’d like to say that I was able to have that moment of nostalgia and self-reflection once I finally found those tapes in my childhood things and was met with a very serious problem. I had no cassette player to listen to my audiobooks! I can’t quite express the disappointment in being so excited to listen to your childhood self and be denied it through lack of access to analog technology. I never realized how I took these forms of tools for granted. I’d like to think that platforming these audiobooks into more modern forms of technology to avoid this problem would be ideal, but now I find myself conflicted. When I think of Eurocentric models of learning like the Victorian era, my first response is to turn away and look instead to the indigenous values of oral tradition and preservation of knowledge through the passing down of ancestors. The form in which my mother chose to engage me with my imagination through reading became a bonding experience in which not only my reading skills improved, but my general sense of self was instilled through an oral tradition passed on through ancestral generations. In summary I’m conflicted as to how modern technology is a force moving us away from oral tradition or more towards it?

Hello everyone! So I wanted to use this week’s blog to address a point made by Matthew Rubery in his journal Play It Again, Sam Weller: New Digital Audio Books and New Ways of Reading that I consider being key in how we read literature across multiple parts of the world. To preface my discussion, Rubery wrote the following:

“Although it would be easy to overstate the degree to which technology changes the way we communicate, there is nevertheless compelling evidence of its influence over the way people read that should not go unheard.25 Advances in audio technology have the potential to change the way we think about reading practices for two reasons. The first is that digital audio will turn more readers into listeners.” (Rubery 64)

That last sentence is key here, “The first is that digital audio will turn more readers into listeners” (Rubery 64). When we read, it is very difficult to pick up how something is supposed to sound. Thus, we may miss the point intended entirely. The context behind the things we say is what drives how we say it and the connotation of what we’re expressing. That brings me to the audiobook I have chosen to present to you all in class today:

“The Bells,” a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, at first glance is a rather simplistic piece. As readers, we often just read through it or read it how we think it is supposed to be read. Especially for those of us who do not directly study English literature. However, upon taking a second look, and reading the poem out loud or having someone else read it to you, we can discover some unique characteristics of the piece before us. In each stanza of “The Bells,” Poe starts to describe another type of bell, and when reading to yourself it seems like a pretty flat piece, but when you bring audio tools into it you realize that with each stanza there exists a switch of mood and sound.

During the first stanza, Poe describes the experiences associated with silver bells. We all know that to be Christmas time, the holiday season. This stanza utilizes language in a way that portrays a sense of happiness, jolliness if you will. There are specific influxes in your voice when reading the language with the associated cheerful emotion that portrays the sound intended. Then he moves onto talking about golden bells, which we associate with weddings (also associated with wealth and love in general). This stanza uses calmness as a tool, a smooth and happy block of text symbolizing the long-term content that marriage/love brings us as humans. Finally, the brazen (bronze) bells, he uses them to create a sense of fear. There exists a lot of urgency in this stanza that strikes discomfort in the listener when reading how it was intended to be read. Rubery’s point was that listening is starkly different from just reading a text. It also helps to bring out the brilliance of the author. This especially applies when reading literature from other regions. Rhyme, for example, can only sometimes be deciphered when reading in a specific accent. For example, a New Yorker may not understand the audio cues of a poem written in Scotland.

Now, how can we do all of this sound analysis when there are situations where audiobooks/readings are unavailable? Lucky for us, there are digital tools out there being further developed to map these audio influxes in literature. Below I am attaching a screenshot of the tool Poemage, developed by the University of Utah, which is an incredible tool that takes the uploaded piece and shows you how each word is supposed to sound and where it overlaps with other words:

Unfortunately, the University of Utah took the download link down while they do some updates, so I cannot show you guys the extent of the tool. I used it back in late 2016 and it has only improved since. All in all, Rubery drew a line between reading and listening, and I agree. They both stimulate different parts of the brain simultaneously in order to further our understanding of literature and assisting with decoding the intention of the author (or a variation of the author’s intention).

“A Report for an Academy” (1917) by Franz Kafka is a short story told by Red Peter, an ape who was captured on Africa’s Gold Coast (now Ghana) and shipped to Europe, and who learned to act like a human to escape captivity. Red Peter tells the story of his transformation from ape to human to a scientific academy in an undetermined European city, observing that it was only when he mastered human language that he was able to secure a way out of his cage on the ship. He puts a seal of sorts on his humanization by writing his story and telling it aloud to a sophisticated audience. This rhetorical situation makes “A Report for an Academy” an intriguing audiobook, and the voice of Martin Reyto reading Ian Johnston’s unabridged translation of Kafka’s short story for Librivox brings Red Peter close.

Although Librivox does not categorize this audiobook as “Dramatized Reading,” Reyto throws himself into his role, and I imagine Red Peter clad in a red satin dressing gown (he has become a music hall star) seated in his heavily upholstered apartment (I wonder if Reyto recorded his voice in a closet) deep in the ancient streets of Vienna or Prague, sheltered from the inclement weather, drinking a strong cordial and perhaps smoking a cigar. At first it was not easy to reconcile my idea of Red Peter with Reyto’s audiobook. For one, I thought Red Peter was younger because he says that he was captured five years before, and Reyto’s voice is clearly the voice of an older man. Secondly, I did not imagine Red Peter so weary. My first impulse was to reject Reyto’s reading of “Report for an Academy” because it seemed counter to how I had imagined the tale, but I listened on and as I did, Red Peter changed in my mind. Reyto’s reading is convincing; his cadence is fittingly mournful, and the harrowing last two sentences of the second to last paragraph are delivered with an awareness of the horror they admit:

When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific societies, or from social gatherings in someone’s home, a small half-trained female chimpanzee is waiting for me, and I take my pleasure with her the way apes do. During the day I don’t want to see her, for she has in her gaze the madness of a bewildered trained animal. I’m the only one who recognizes that, and I cannot bear it. (Franz Kafka, “A Report for an Academy”)

The sound quality of Reyto’s recording is excellent. There is no echo, and no sound of breathing or background noise (the absence of background noise is good for this story; other stories would be better with background noise). Altogether, listening to this audiobook was not unpleasant but for now, I find that listening to a novel or short story requires more effort than reading it would do. However, humans are adaptable creatures and I trust through practice listening gets easier.

Note: as I explored Librivox in search of an audiobook I wanted to write this blog post on, I was impressed with the great variety of recording qualities, voices and styles. To be honest, most of the audiobooks I started listening to bothered me in one way or another, but one that struck me as an inspiring model – I find I like to hear a variety of narrators – is Wuthering Heights (version 3 dramatic reading).

I approached finding my audiobook in the wild by thinking about the relationship of the author’s voice to a work of fiction. The comparison of the audible voice, versus the stylistic written voice seemed like it could have a pushing and pulling effects in the perception of a story. I immediately thought of Truman Capote, whose voice is famously distinct and whose style is distinctly rich in description which has the effect, to me of being equally tight and intimate, as it is ethnographic and isolated. I chose to find a recording of him reading any of his short stories, or an excerpt from a novel. I’ve read a lot of his work, but not recently, so I thought that any story would be a good example of this performance. I searched online for a recording of him reading his short story “A Christmas Memory,” and found a video on Youtube of the recording, which was originally published on vinyl in 1959. This them really set me out into the wild as I tried to instead find a physical copy of it to play on my record player at home. The album cost $60 on Amazon, and would not arrive until September 17th so that wouldn’t work; I called every record store in New York and notable ones outside (but nearby) the city with no luck. I called the New York Public Library who advised me on the proper search terms to locate it in their archives; they had 2 copies, available to listen to at the Library of Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

At the library I was hoping to be able to sit with a record player to have the physical interaction of setting up the record, flipping it to the B-side, etc. but they have it set up where they hook you up to a computer and a person “in the basement” (the librarian told me specifically they were in the basement), plays it on the record player down there. This added a new component to the physicality of this audio, because it added a new author and participant to the mix. I was not listening to the audiobook alone, but through the discernment and acuity of an incognito librarian in a basement somewhere under me. I was especially aware of this while waiting for the story to begin playing, and even more-so when I waited for this person—who played the roles of technician, co-listener with me, and co-author with Capote—to flip to the B side of the track to play the second half of the story. This interruption gave me a time that I would not have given for myself to contemplate the story so far, which would not have existed with a typical audiobook playing all the way through. It also made me cognizant of what control Capote would have had over where this break occurred: it was at the end of paragraph and sentence, but I wonder if he made the decision of which paragraph to flip the record on, how much space or leeway there was on each side of the track for him to have a choice in this decision or if it was purely dictated by the size of the sides. This was something I would have been interested to make an assessment on based on the appearance of the vinyl, but alas I was not allowed access to it.

As they would not give me the record, I had to make a special request to see the sleeve. This actually proved an instrumental tool in my reading of the audio book. The front of the sleeve had artwork by the artist Gray Foy, who I learned was a prominent and widely respected surrealist artist of the 20th century, while the middle and back of the sleeve has the entire story printed on it. Both of these visuals created a physical space upon which to navigate the story as I listened to it, creating a physical space much closer to a book than the typical audiobook.  But even the tangible flatness of a record sleeve gave a strange two-dimensional effect to a story which when traditionally printed is around 40 pages.

Listening to the audio presented the questions I expected to encounter entering the project: I was confronted with Capote’s unique sound and inflections, where he stumbled on words, missed (or skipped) sentences, changed his voice, even slightly, to match his conception of the characters. These affected the story by giving me a hyper-truthful understanding of his intentions of the story; however, it disrupted my reading (or, rather, listening) by giving me little room to impose my own interpretations. There was also symphonic music by Irving Joseph that sandwiched Capote’s reading of the text, a music that also imposed a mood and feeling onto my perception of the text. Ambient noise such as the fuzziness from the record player which came through on my head phones, the occasional quiet scratch and scrape, as well as the not-completely-noiseless pause when the record was flipped which was a silence filled with ultra-low, ambient bumps and “woosh” sounds. They made me aware of my own context, as well as the age and antiquated novelty of the record itself (this copy was 59 years old.) On a text that is all about the prevalence of memory, the participation with time and space in reading it, as well as in what most people of my generation would call an old-fashioned environment to listen to an audio book (the library).

I ended out finding that the typical questions of the effects of sound on a text in the audiobook was a lot less interesting to me than the odd physicality of the audiobook on vinyl. The record itself, which is made of its own language and modes of inscription and form, and the way they re-created the experience of the traditionally written text, next to the sleeve with the text written out invented a unique space and an unconventional audiobook experience. It reaffirmed a certain level of grounding in the technology and act of inscription onto a surface that texts, and this text especially, cannot seem to escape, and forced my participation with it.