Srsly wtf

It’s a weird stage of life when one hopes for blood tests to return a result indicating that something is wrong.

Well, nothing’s wrong. I don’t have any detectable tumor marker — which is awesome.

My thyroid hormones are right where they should be, which also should be awesome.

Except I don’t feel awesome. And thus my bundle of wacky symptoms appears to be something other than hypothyroidism. So now it’s off to investigate other possibilities (I have some alternate theories but since my first stab at self-diagnosis was an epic fail, I’ll just look into them quietly. . . ).

Or maybe I’m just neurasthenic in that grand 19th century tradition. Excuse me while I go write some romantic poetry and consider the intensity of a blade of grass.

Blood!

It wasn’t my first encounter with the US healthcare system since moving to Canada but it was instructive. It’s time for my various thyroid-related blood tests. I have my orders from my doctor in Montreal. I need to pay out of pocket, at least at first (I can petition Quebec to cover the costs but who knows how much they will cover). I call the Stanford University Hospital. They want $800 freaking dollars for a standard battery of tests for someone who has no thyroid (TSH, T3, T4, thyroglobulin, etc). I ask about a discount. They say 40% off for people who pay out of pocket.* Then I call the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, a nonprofit. $300 for the same battery of tests. 30% discount for out of pocket*. You can guess where I went. The whole thing took about 3 hours or a little more. Most of that time was on the phone with different people, all of whom were helpful. And only about 10 minutes of medical attention (once I was “inside the gates,” everything happened really fast). But it should be a lot more smooth and straightforward next time. At least I hope so.

More news when I have it (maybe Friday, maybe next Friday) but suffice it to say that I have a hypothesis, and it involves the first four letters of the word “hypothesis.”

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*I just read recently in the Haggler or somewhere that you always ask for a discount on expensive stuff. I figured with prices this insane, they probably had one. What was amazing was how easy it was. All I had to do was ask. Which begs the question of why billing isn’t instructed to offer that amount up without prompting, since we all know which class positions are most likely to feel comfortable enough to ask for some money off, and which aren’t. . . . The moral of the story: always ask for a discount. Nicely.

Digital Humanities Position at McGill

I’ve forwarded this announcement to a few listservs. I’m not on the search committee (I’m on sabbatical!) and the hire won’t necessarily even be in my department, but I have a “rooting interest” in the position, so I post it here just in case the blog has readers that haven’t seen the announcement. For people outside Canada, you can learn about the CRC program here. Tier 2 is a junior chair.

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Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Digital Humanities

The Faculty of Arts at McGill University invites applications for a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Digital Humanities. The successful candidate will have the academic credentials necessary for a tenure-track appointment as an advanced Assistant or Associate Professor in an appropriate disciplinary department.

Funded by the Government of Canada, Tier 2 Canada Research Chairs allow Canadian universities to attract and retain exceptional emerging researchers. Chairholders are also eligible for infrastructure support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation to help acquire state-of-the-art equipment essential to their work. For further information on the CRC program, please see http://www.chairs-chaires.gc.ca/.

We seek a scholar with a proven record of securing external funding to support digital humanities initiatives and the ability to build institutional capability in this area at McGill. The successful candidate will have a broad understanding of the history, significance, and application of digital technologies in one or more substantive areas of the humanities, including a demonstrated interest in the development of new digital tools and innovative methodologies. Along with critically exploring how digital technology can augment the practice of humanities scholarship, the CRC in Digital Humanities will advance the role humanities scholarship plays in developing our understanding of digital media in one or more of the domains of culture: art, literature, film, theatre, sound, architecture, and/or other media or forms of expression.

Applications should include a letter of interest, curriculum vitae, writing samples, evidence of teaching effectiveness, and three letters of reference. The position start date is August 1, 2011. Review of applications will begin on February 11, 2011, and will continue until the position is filled.

PLEASE FORWARD SUPPORTING MATERIALS TO:

Professor Juliet Johnson
Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2T6

All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority. McGill University is committed to equity in employment and diversity. It welcomes applications from indigenous peoples, visible minorities, ethnic minorities, persons with disabilities, women, persons of minority sexual orientations and gender identities and others who may contribute to further diversification.

The World Soundscape Project

A week ago today, I visited the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser to talk with Barry Truax and his students. For those who read this blog and know me in some other way than as a sound scholar, The WSP and the group of people involved with it — R. Murray Schafer, Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp and many others — are probably still the best-known intellectual contribution of Canadians to thought about sound. (The other being the so-called Toronto School with McLuhan, Ong, et al.) There’s probably an interesting essay in the question of why Canadians developed so much influential thought about sound in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But I have always understood my own work as a political and theoretical departure from those traditions. So it was interesting to finally meet some of the main figures in the tradition and have real exchanges with them, along with students working in the field today.

This experience, along with hearing Barry’s work live and meeting Hildegard Westerkamp at the Listen Again conference was something of a revelation for me. I have always preferred their work to R. Murray Schafer’s, as both have a much stronger sense of the mediality of sound and have much more sophisticated takes on recording and signal processing as aesthetic and political practices. Truax’s Acoustic Communication is a singular book, especially when you read it in the intellectual context of its time. But the truth is that I probably have given less time to acoustic ecology as a tradition than I should, mostly because I find Schafer’s politics so utterly reactionary.

The visit was a real delight. I had lots of time to talk with Barry and to learn from him, both about the history of the project (and Schafer’s Tuning of the World) and about his own work, which includes the first real-time actualization of granular synthesis. Granular synthesis (and granulation) are techniques I find both fascinating intellectually and sonically appealing. (In fact, they’ve helped me understand digital audio in a fundamentally new way, but that’s a story for another time). It was also great to meet his students and to see the space. I was somehow expecting a massive archive of tapes, but the project’s archive of recordings is actually remarkably compact.

Its housing also contains a nice synoptic media history.

In this picture from 1982, you can see Hildegard Westerkamp standing in front of the tapes, which all exist in analog form, with a few digital copies on betamax (!) tape:

In my picture from last week, below, you can see more of the history. The archive started out on analog tape — shown at the top and bottom of the shelf. In the late 70s and 80s (I hope I have my dates right) — they archived those analog tapes to digital audio tape on betamax (2nd, 3rd and 4th shelves from the top). The next move was to DAT (Digital Audio Tape) in the 1990s (5th shelf down–the small one). I love the piles of CD-Rs and the spindle of blank CDs, which are not archival formats but rather their mode of distribution for people interested in obtaining copies, and which push the history into the 2000s.

They are currently archiving the analog recordings again as digital files that will live on a hard drive with a database and links to images of the places recorded. I’m hoping to acquire a copy of the archive for McGill. But of course that can’t be pictured in the same way. The archive will disappear inside the hardware. A single hard drive could contain much more than that whole shelf. The digital life of the WSP is a story of formats, more than media. Which is also a point I belabor in my mp3 book–that formats, as well as “media” in the traditional sense, need to be considered as subjects of communication history.

Anyway, last Monday we spent a couple hours talking about our different interests and approaches to sound. And it ended with a little show and tell, as Barry explained why he was able to do tempo-synced rhythms in his newer work but not in his original 1986 Riverrun composition (which is the piece where realtime granular synthesis was first achieved). In exchange, I showed in Audio Ease’s Riverrun, a piece of software named for his composition and the tool through which I first explored granulation of audio. I’d been having problems with it in terms of stability and interface, but I was able to get it to behave long enough to turn a Prince song into a long, evolving soundscape (and it appears a new update just appeared, which I just downloaded).

I don’t think I will ever call myself an acoustic ecologist (and was interested to learn Barry doesn’t call himself one), and we didn’t even get into epistemology and method (or rather, they asked those questions, and I didn’t have the presence of mind to turn it around). Most of Schafer’s core concepts–soundscape, hi-fi/lo-fi, schizophonia, etc–still trouble me. But I’m really pleased to have met everyone I did, and more importantly, to get a better sense of the real intellectual diversity in the living tradition of discourse about soundscapes. I’m sure there will be other chances to talk . . . .

The Sorry Bus

I’ve been on the road for the last 8 days, and both stops were returns of a sort.

The first stop was Vancouver. I keynoted a conference called Listen Again at the Surrey Art Gallery. And I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, at the risk of sounding like a smug Canadian wannabe, it was good to be back in Canada. And nothing says “you’re in English Canada” more poignantly than a bus with a big bright “sorry” sign on it. I saw a few of those, although this is not my picture. The picture is apparently a bus from Edmonton, which is reassuring since it means it’s not Vancouver-specific. I’ve now spent a few days shy of three months living back in the US, and I haven’t been faithful in cataloging my experiences here, at least not yet. But I can say that six years away from the US changes one’s perspective on it, even if I’m under an hour away. I probably mentioned it last summer but we have now lived in Montreal longer than anywhere else as adults. I don’t know if we’re really “of” the place given the intensity of locals’ attachments to the culture, but we’re more of the place than anywhere else at this point, or at least as “of a place” as rootless cosmopolitan academics can be. So, “distinct society” debates aside, it was good to be back in our adopted country.

The conference was great for a number of reasons. About 100 people made the god-awful-long drive to Surrey to hear the talks, which is impressive in and of itself. The panelists were a mix of academics, artists and musicians. I didn’t clock it until the day of the conference, but my keynote was the only truly academic talk of any of them. Still, it seemed to go over well with the crowd. It was my first attempt at a “what is sound studies?” talk. Although I do some field defining as a practical matter in my graduate seminar, I don’t normally give “future of the field” talks. Honestly, I would rather people surprise me with awesome and astounding work that I couldn’t possibly imagine myself than for them to do whatever I think up to tell them to do. But that’s what the organizers wanted and I figured the thought would be useful for the Sound Studies Reader anyway. And I like to satisfy, though I did make a point of spending the first 10-15 minutes on the domestication of noise in dentistry and architectural acoustics (partly developed in the mp3 book but probably also a spinoff essay). Brady Cranfield, the convener, mentioned getting recordings of the talk up on the site, so it is possible you will be able to hear it at some point.

For me, the content of the talk was less of a challenge than the form. It is still a physical challenge for me to speak for 40 minutes straight. The organizers actually put up a proper monitor by the podium, so I could hear my voice loudly as I talked. That worked well and in future talks I may try and rig something up for myself if the tech people are not as accommodating. I also wrote it out mostly word for word, which is not my normal practice, but may have to become it so that I can focus on breath and delivery and think less about what I say than how I say it. I practiced the talk on Saturday for Carrie and it went really well. I kept my throat relaxed and delivered in a conversational voice rather than the grand theatrical delivery that I use in big fora. So far so good. But in the actual talk itself the adrenaline kicked in and I found myself straining. I probably need more vocal coaching for public speaking, as I can see this is going to be an issue. I need to learn to relax and let the technology do the heavy lifting, at least on the amplification front, and find other ways to be expressive.

Also, my iPad is a little too touch sensitive in keynote (the software, not the activity). I had a couple glitches switching slides when I wasn’t supposed to and had one musical gaffe as well, though since they were both funny, they enhanced the talk rather than detracted from it.

The whole weekend was great. We saw musical performances by Barry Truax and Tim Hecker in the same evening (with the help of a taxi) on Friday and serendipitously landed at a dinner party Saturday with still other people, some of whom we knew and some of whom we didn’t (including Hans-Joachim Braun — yet another sound studies character — who I didn’t expect to see so many time zones away from Germany). I’ll say more about Monday and my visit to Simon Fraser in a separate post.

Tuesday we flew to Oregon to visit our friends Carol, Mrak and Tony for US thanksgiving. We’ve had something like 14 thanksgivings with them now. It was, as usual, great and Oregon is gorgeous. It’s so green there.

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TSA-related postscript: Carrie got the pat-down on the way to Vancouver, I got the weird scanner thing. I was too worried about my pants falling off without my belt in to be properly outraged. My mom asked if Carrie was sexually molested. Her tactful reply was “the woman was very clear about what she was going to do and when.”

I do not feel any safer from terrorism because of it.

Retroactive Hiatus Declaration

Oops. It’s been a month. Sorry! I’ll be back. Santa Barbara is beautiful. The Center is beautiful. Tomorrow, we head off to Vancouver where we will stay at the Sylvia and I will talk at the Surrey Art Gallery. I’m sure they’re beautiful.

A snapshot of Carrie’s rant when I told her I thought I was drinking too much caffeine since arriving here. . .

Welcome to the real world. You’ve been living in some nature-fairy land while the rest of us have been drugging ourselves since the age of 16 just to get by. You don’t smoke and you hardly drink and now you’re all like “Ooooo! Two cups of tea in the morning!”

It’s probably funnier to hear than to read. I don’t drink coffee and until about 2007 or so I didn’t even drink caffeine in the morning of any kind. At that point I started in on tea. Now that I’m back in the US, the easy availability of iced tea, along with Carrie’s burgeoning interest in bubble tea, and my new, slightly earlier schedule, seems to have led to a situation where I am taking in considerably more of this upper than I used to. When I remarked upon this situation to Carrie, she did not think it was something to be seriously concerned about. In fact, I think it would be more accurate to say she found the proposition 50% ridiculous and 50% hilarious.