Irv Teibel’s Environments, AI Audio, and the Future of Listening w/ Machine Listening

How did we humans become so dependent on white noise machines, noise-canceling headphones, lo-fi girl and other technologies that help us privatize and individualize our soundscape? An important character in that cultural history is Irv Teibel, whose environments series helped change how we listen. These records were the first to use recorded natural soundscapes as technologies to change how we feel and function. 

My guests this episode are Joel Stern and James Parker, two thirds of the art and research collective known as ⁠Machine Listening⁠—a group that shares my fascination with Teibel. With their partner Sean Dockray, James and Joel have released a vinyl record called ⁠Environments 12: New Concepts in Acoustic Enrichment⁠. This album reimagines Irv Teibel’s 1970s Environments albums—those “relaxation records” made for stressed-out people—as a set of soundscapes made for the stressed-out environment itself. 

The project mixes archival nature recordings, synthetic atmospheres, and AI-generated voices into strange new habitats. Narrators—some human, some machine—tell fables about seashores, reefs, and animal enclosures, where the line between the natural and the artificial dissolves. The result is a haunting, witty, and thought-provoking album that asks what it means to listen when both humans and environments are under pressure. 

Machine Listening’s art and research practice is deeply engaged with the politics of datasets, algorithmic systems, surveillance, and the shifting dynamics of power in “listening” technologies. Among other things, they interrogate how voice assistants, smart speakers, and algorithmic audio systems mediate — and often extract data from — human sound.  Their installations and performances have been shown in institutions worldwide, including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, and at festivals like Unsound.  In short, Machine Listening blends creative and critical strategies to explore and expose the hidden infrastructures of acoustic power.

⁠James Parker⁠ and ⁠Joel Stern⁠ are both based in Melbourne Australia, where Parker is Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School and Stern is Research Fellow at RMIT School of Media and Communication. In this conversation we go deep on environments, AI, and recent innovations that surveil and remediate the environment in order to save it--for example playing recordings of healthy ocean reefs to sick ones to improve their vitality. It's some pretty wild shit. 

As always, you can join to get the extra long version of this conversation, including our guests recommendations on things to read, listen and do. Just go to ⁠mackhagood.com⁠ to join. 

That's also where you should go to get our free monthly newsletter with all kinds of great links and resources for people obsessed with sound. We just dropped the first edition and I'm telling you, it's brimming with sonic content that I can't squeeze into the podcast.

Chapters:

0:00 The Origins of Environments: Irv Teibel’s Ocean Recording

7:14 Introducing Machine Listening: Art, Technology, and Sound

13:08 The Environments Series: Cultural Impact and Reception

18:58 Avant-Garde Meets Commerce: Teibel’s Methods and Influence

24:51 Bell Labs, IBM, and the Birth of Machine Listening

30:53 Simulation, Emulation, and the Legacy of Environments

36:53 Environments 12: Reimagining Soundscapes for the Environment

42:45 Technologies of the Self and Environmentality

47:55 Sound Design for Zoos: From Field Recordings to Animal Welfare

53:39 Closing Thoughts and Future Directions

Transcript:

Mack: Coney Island Station 1968. A couple of young Manhattanites have taken the long train journey here to reach the edge of the Atlantic. The train doors open revealing Tony Conrad. An experimental musician, filmmaker, and friend to figures such as John Kale and Lou Reed, who named their band after a paperback they found in his apartment. The Velvet Underground.

As he steps out onto the platform of the elevated station. A cold wind stirs Tony's long stringy hair. Following Behind him is a man with glasses and a chinstrap beard. He has a microphone in each hand and a Uher reel to reel tape recorder strapped to his body.

This professional German recorder used by the likes of NASA and the BBC is the reason Irv Teibel has been lured out to Brighton Beach by Conrad on this blustery winter's day. The payer descend the stairs, exit the station, and trudge across the sand of Brighton Beach. Soon Tal is shoeless with pant legs rolled up to his knees.

Conrad is urging him to move farther out into the cold crashing waves Teibel is freezing and irritated. He thinks he could have stayed in his West Village studio and simulated the ocean. But Conrad has insisted on a stereo recording of the real thing for the soundtrack of his experimental film.

'Hey, Tony. Isn't that enough?' Teibel calls out recording himself in the process.

Later, Irv Teibel is warm, dry and alone in his home studio, his drafting table, professional cameras and analog synthesizers look on silently as he threads the Coney Island tape through a machine. And presses play. At first, he hears a lot of things besides ocean waves. Unlike the human mind, a tape recorder has no attentional filters.

It hears whatever audible vibrations it encounters. Years later, media theorist Friedrich a Kittler will write that audio recording gave humans their first access to the 'noise of the real' capturing it and storing actual acoustic data rather than converting it into words and musical notes. Those symbols born of the human mind, but right now reality is intruding on the lush ocean sound that Conrad wants for his new film.

There were the brief, distorted eruptions of wind in the microphones, the distracting urban noises, the sound of Teibel's own voice, complaining, but then a magical passage in the tape opens up. It reveals a sonic vista unblemished by wind or voice, leaving only the noise of the ocean itself in all its stereophonic splendor.

It is perhaps three minutes long, and unlike anything Teibel has ever heard, he rewinds and listens again and again to this brief moment of time. These sound waves harvested from the shore of Brighton Beach. While he listens, he thinks what begins to develop in his mind is something that transcends sound effects and film soundtracks.

He begins to envision a type of media that goes beyond entertainment, one designed to wash away stress and distraction. He will reimagine the audio recording as a new kind of environment in itself, a loop of time, space that can repeat itself as tirelessly and faithfully as the ocean waves and the noise of these endless waves will create a safe harbor for living. The project that was beginning to emerge in Irv Teibel's mind in 1968, like a photograph developing in his dark room, was a series of recordings he would call Environments. New concepts in Stereo Sound. The album of crashing waves that Teibel eventually produced was not exactly Kittler's noise of the reel.

In fact, it was more than that. The computer processed recording thatty made would contain the noise of the Hyperreal, the ultimate seashore of the mind's ear. Even better. This new mediated environment would aid the human mind when its attentional filters weren't strong enough. Instead of picking up the reality of urban noise and annoying voices, this new kind of recording would block that reality out.

Drowning all the unwanted sounds of modernity in a pounding virtual surf.

Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a podcast about sound. I'm Mack Hagood. And what you just heard is an excerpt from the book. I'm currently writing for Penguin Press, tentatively titled The End of Listening: what We Lose When We Cancel Noise. It's my attempt at a mainstream book about my research into how our culture became so dependent on white noise machines, noise canceling headphones, Lo-Fi girl, and all of the other technologies that help us privatize and individualize our soundscape.

An important character in that cultural history is Irv Teibel, whose Environment Series helped change how we listen. And I shared that excerpt with you because my guests today also share my fascination with Irv and his sonic creations. My guests today are Joel Stern and James Parker. Two thirds of the art and research collective known as Machine Listening.

Along with their partner, Sean, Dockray, James and Joel produce work across writing, software, installation, performance curation, 

pedagogy, and radio. Their practice is deeply engaged with the politics of data sets, algorithmic systems, surveillance, and the shifting dynamics of power in listening technologies. So, for example, you know, voice assistance.

Smart speakers, algorithmic audio systems, all of these different ways that human sound is being mediated and extracted and analyzed and simulated and so on. Their installations and performances have been shown in institutions worldwide, including the Australian Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, and at festivals like unsound.

Today we're talking about Machine Listening's recent project. It's a record came out on vinyl. It's called Environments 12 New Concepts in Acoustic Enrichment. This record reimagines Irv Teibel's, 1970s environments, albums, those relaxation records made for stressed out people as a set of soundscapes made for the stressed out environment itself.

The project mixes, archival nature recordings, synthetic atmospheres, and I. AI generated voices into strange new habitats. Narrators, some of them are humans, some of them are AI tell fables about seashores reefs and animal enclosures, where the line between the natural and the artificial dissolves the result is a haunting and witty and provoking album that asks what it means to listen when both humans and environments are under pressure.

James Parker and Joel Stern are both based in Melbourne, Australia, where Parker is associate professor at Melbourne Law School, and Stern is Research fellow at RMIT School of Media and Communication. In this conversation, we go deep on environments. AI and recent innovations that surveil and remediate the environment in order to save it.

So for example, playing recordings of healthy ocean reefs to sick ocean reefs in the hopes of improving their vitality. It's some pretty wild shit. I think you'll find it interesting. As always, you can join us and get the extra long version of this conversation, including our guest's recommendations on things to read, listen to and do.

Just go to phantompod.org to join. Phantompod.org is also where you can get our free monthly newsletter with all kinds of great links and resources for people obsessed with sound. We just dropped the first edition, and I'm telling you, it's just brimming with sonic content that I cannot squeeze into the podcast.

So sign up for free at phantompod.org. And, uh, enough preamble. Let's get into my conversation with James Parker and Joel Stern of Machine Listening. James Parker and Joel Stern. Welcome Phantom Power.

Joel: Thanks for having us.

Mack: So your group machine listening is I think of it as sort of like a mashup of a think tank, uh, an art studio, a software developer. There's just a whole lot going on and I feel like if we just unpacked it in the beginning of the show, we would spend 20 minutes at least just talking about what machine listening is. So I thought maybe we could start off instead by just jumping directly into what think is a shared, uh, passion or fascination of ours, which is Irv Teibel and his environment series, which, you guys have kind taken as inspiration for your latest project.

So would one of you guys like to just maybe kick things off by talking about Irv Teibel and Environments? 

Joel: So, the pragmatic answer right is a series of records released between, I think 1969 and 1979. Um, there, there were 11. Of them and each record, uh, had a side of, you know, about 30 minutes. And on each side was, um, something that was presented either as a field recording you, you know, or a nature recording or, um, some other kind of meditation, um, on the sonic environment.

Sometimes they were synthetically produced as well, which is a rather unusual dimension of the series, which presents itself as, um, an encounter with the natural world, but pretty quickly, you know, offers up, um, a kind of synthetic sound world as natural in a certain way as an environment, let's say.

Mack: Yeah.

Yeah. so, so it's, uh, sort of presented as a sonic environment of some sort. So there, there's like one, um, called the psychologically ultimate seashore. There's called a Country stream, wood masted sailboat.

And there had been natural field recordings before the Environment series. Um, and there had been sound effects records, but there hadn't been a set of alleged field recordings or nature sounds that were designed for these kinds of, self-care practices, we might say. Right? Like something to really change the space that the person is living in and through sound and, and change how they're feeling. and so I, I've personally researched these records. I, I find them pretty fascinating. Um, and maybe we could talk about some of the reasons I, I find them interesting, but I'm kind of, you know, curious to hear more. You mentioned, uh, Joel Cybernetics. I'm, I'm curious to hear like what you guys as media theorists and artists found initially fascinating 

about these records, maybe even before developing your own project.

Joel: I was always aware of environments at least since the late nineties when, you know, as a teenager I worked in secondhand record stores and the environments records were sort of ubiquitous in the sound effects section or the ephemera section of, of secondhand stores. 

Mack: Were they ubiquitous in Australia?

Joel: They were, yeah, exactly. Um, you would always see environments, records in the secondhand bins, uh, o often just for a few dollars. You know, they were at the cheap end of the spectrum. They certainly weren't, um, as I recall, collectors items or anything like that. They were more kind of like eccentric oddities that, uh, occasionally DJs and sort of nature recording enthusiasts would come and buy.

James: And in a specific case of, um, you know, natural sound for the, for wellbeing or for what have you, you know, it's just really interesting to imagine a time when that kind of explanation was necessary, you know, as well, because it just, it just doesn't seem that way now. Everybody is used to it. I've been playing, you know, different versions of white noise and environmental sounds to my son to help him go to sleep more or less since he was born.

And, you know, clearly it required a lot of explanation. We found a, a great interview, um, on some American, uh, sort of news segment where the conversation with Irv Tebel and the, the interviewer is just so, sort of surprised and sort of fascinated by the con the concept and that it's really helpful to be put in the head space that, that that was something that required a lot of work.

Um, the kind of the commodification of that kind of sound it's selling to us now via streaming as a sort of a new way, you know, a new form of orphic media as you put it in your work like that required a lot of work. Uh, it, it wasn't obvious to people. And Irv Tal is a kind of pioneer, uh, obviously in that respect.

Joel: and that interview, um, that James was referencing, I think it, it was like a daytime TV segment. Um, very, very much for kind of like a ma, a mainstream audience.

Um 

Mack: Is it video of Teibel?

Joel: E. Exactly. Yeah. So it's Teibel being interviewed by, you've never seen it? Oh, it's, it's absolutely amazing. So a it's video of Teibel being interviewed by a host and uh, I think it might be 1980 or 1981, so it's very much at the end of the run of records.

And, he explains the entire environments project. He describes it as an idea whose time had come, um, which is quite funny considering it was already kind of 11 or 12 years into the project. Um, but it, it, it has these amazing segments where excerpts from the records are played and the camera just lingers on the faces of Teibel and the host and you sort of get to observe them listening to the sound and in a way mo modeling the kind of listening that they have attempted to produce. Um, and the host her faces, sort of as James said, um, y you know, she, she looks sort of surprised, as if she's struggling to find the right register for something so novel.

Interviewer: What's your biggest seller right now?

Irv Teibel: I'd say the thunderstorm probably is.

Interviewer: Thunderstorm, can we listen to the thunderstorm? Do we have that one? Okay.

Boy, that is nice. That is really nice. I bet that is hard to reproduce something like a thunderstorm.

Irv Teibel: Well, it's hard to record too.

Interviewer: How do you do that?

Irv Teibel: Well, I spend a year making thunderstorm recordings all over the place, and it's very hard to predict when a thunderstorm is going to happen, how long it's going to be.

Interviewer: No kidding.

Irv Teibel: And, uh, I ruined literally dozens of microphones making recordings and, uh, this one was recorded. In my own apartment, um, in my bathroom actually.

Interviewer: Was it really?

Irv Teibel: I had a huge window. It's actually a toilet, wasn't it? Face? Well, no, no, I don't.

Joel: Um, but Teibel, of course, looks, looks very focused and concentrated and serious and, uh, bringing the kind of gravitas to the, to the listening. But, um, just to,

Mack: He was good at that.

Joel: no, totally. And I think, um, we. You know, started with our kind of interests, um, in this, through the records themselves. And the very extensive liner notes, the imagined listener or reader is not a sort of technical or academic listener.

It's, you know, all of the references to head music and sort of chilling out and, and so forth suggest a different kind of listener. I guess 69 we're thinking the end of the hippie era and the kind of emergence of an, of a different kind of environmental consciousness. Also a consciousness of the environment receding and being more fragile.

Um. And, you know, the fetish for reproduction of the environment also coincides with that sense perhaps of loss of the environment proper. And, but we came to Teibel, um, through sort of what wondering it was that had produced this discourse, this design sensibility, these records. It was clear that it was, there's something very auteurist about the whole thing that it had kind

 of emerged out of the passion.

Um, and also out of the pitch of a certain person who, you know, it turns out was an advertising executive as well, right. Or he had a marketing background and which he brought to this series. And yeah, when we started to find out a bit more about how this was a person who, on the one hand was standing at Coney Island Beach with Tony Conrad, you, you know, and had studied with Stockhausen and on the other hand was involved in marketing and advertising and had somehow brought those two things together to produce this product, um, that was selling environmental sound as a new kind of lifestyle, um, commodity.

You know, that, that became really fascinating for us. 'cause all of us have a really strong interest in avant garde and experimental music, and those, histories and that, that's my background specifically. Um, but we're also very interested in how those, you know, modernist, avant gardes intersect with, you know, capital especially with techno capitalism in that moment and the kind of new possibilities that are emerging.

Mack: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. Because Teibel's a guy who's sort of been, you know, ostensibly trained in musique concrete and and, doing these kind cut techniques. So he's familiar with that. But then he's bringing this kind of you know, new age hucksterism to the way presents the work you know, and there are resonances with like Tony Conrad's flicker films, which is media that's designed to act on the senses of perceiver to have an effect rather than a representational thing. 

You know, Teibel said you're not supposed to listen to these records You're supposed to them Right and they're supposed to have an effect on you tony Conrad's flicker films were very similarly, like just this flashing that was make you you, know, hallucinate without taking acid.

And, people, you know, were using Teibel's records to kind of go on these mental trips with their friends or enhance sex, or supposedly make their plants grow faster and, all these things that that, Teibel claimed. So it is a kind of interesting, um, sort of mashup of, of avant-garde techniques with this very utilitarian way thinking about what our record can what media can be what media can do and I think it, a way, calls forward a lot your interests in ai.

Because when I think about ai, i kind think of it in the sort of William s Burroughs, Brian Geen, like cut-up method. to me it's like a very sophisticated cut-up machine Like it's taking these very avant garde techniques but then just using them in the, the most utilitarian and crass possible way.

Joel: It's is very cool that you compare the flick of film, to the Environment series as a, like haptic sort of work that, um, impacts directly on the sensors. But I'll just say that, you know, every claim that, you know, Teibel will made that you me mentioned about sort of the, the impact of listening on the body or whatever, that that has sort of proven to be commercially viable and successful and is now kind of pervasive.

Whereas Conrad's, um, Flickr films, if I showed those in class, I think I would get complaints and uh, you know, obviously they did come with a warning at the time to, but it, it is kind of amazing fork in the road there where one avantgarde strategy always remains in the avantgarde and the other one becomes, yeah.

Mack: Yeah.

But it was, it was very clear that he and his wife Beverly, who were working on this avant garde film and they needed, you know, some ocean sounds for the sound of their film that I really got the strong sense that they were just talking to Teibel. 'Cause he had this really great recorder they seemed to think he was a little sketchy and they were definitely not interested. When he came up with the idea of environments, they were like, yeah, no thanks. I think we're going to just give us our tapes...

Joel: and if you've seen the film, um, coming attractions, I dunno if you've, you've seen it, but, um, it's an absolutely bonkers film and it's really the, the other end of the spectrum from what Teibel was go, gonna go on to do.

Mack: yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah. So it's great that you raised that contrast.

James: But if you're interested in, you know, um, machine listening, the other big, uh, sort of nerd moment is the confluence of ib, the, the Bell, uh, so Teibel, taking the recordings to Bell Labs, you know, uh, and processing them on this big IBM um, computer. Because those are really the two mid-century institutions that are most responsible for developing the kinds of machine listening systems that, uh, you know, we're living with today.

So in, especially terms of speech processing, you know, Bell Labs being a sort of telephonics company, and then specializing a lot in speech processing for kind of automatic call routing. Um, you know, people who, um. Shang Lee, have written about this kind of history much better than me, but, you know, Bell's a really important organization there.

And 

then IBM really pioneers speech processing for automatic transcription and kind of, so they're both kind of automating feminized labor of different types, basically around speech and the voice. Um, on one hand Bell for, you know, the automating the work of the call router, uh, and IBM the work of the, the secretary or the, you know, the, the transcriber.

And so those are kind really the key places where machine listening starts to develop. And a lot of them sort of more music based machine listening, uh, experiments, um, you know, you, you wrote about Daisy Bell, I think, uh, and so on. You know, it's happening around the periphery of those institutions as well, or kind of in their spare time and so on.

And so it was really interesting to see, you know, this encounter between, you know, experimental music on the one hand and then kind of entering the lab, um, where Teibel asks, um, for the or, it's never clear to me exactly where the agency is in this story. Is it that Teibel wants the sound to be processed, you know, in this way or.

Mack: so basically Teibel has maybe three minutes of ocean waves. That sounds really, really great. And that's the only uninterrupted three minutes he's got. And he can't seem to figure out how to splice anything longer than three minutes together. He thinks this three minute he, he kind of makes a loop and just keeps listening to it, thinks it's amazing.

Um, but. He needs a way to extend it. And so he tries to go and record again at Coney Island. And it turns out they had dredged the beach apparently. And, and it changed the sound of the waves. They didn't sound good anymore, apparently, to him. And, um, so then he goes up and down the east coast of the United States, recording different beaches, never manages to get a nice 30 minutes of, of ocean sound.

There are too many interruptions, planes passing overhead. You know, anyone who's tried to make a field recording outdoors in the modern world knows what, what this is like. It's pretty, it's pretty tough. Um, and this is pre-digital for most of us, unless you happen to be at Bell Laboratories. Um, and, and so he's playing chess with his friend, Lou Gerstman.

Lou Gerstman is um, uh, a psychologist and someone who has been working on speech processing in computers and he's working at Bell Laboratories and Gerstman says, bring your tapes to me. I'll save you grief And be, he says, I'll digitalize them.

Joel: Hmm.

Mack: And they go to Bell Laboratories after hours. You know, uh, I think the same, in the same area as where Max Matthews and folks are making music on computers, the beginning of computer music, but he's doing this kind of speech processing stuff and I think what I've narrowed it down to is that basically they use this giant room sized IBM 360 computer as a vocoder. And so they sort of take the sonic characteristics of crashing waves and they turn that into a filter that they run Irv's three minutes through, and then it creates this new never repeating set of ocean waves. They're kind of processing the analog recording of ocean waves through a mathematical representation of

Joel: Hmm.

Mack: ideal ocean waves

Joel: it's generative music, basically.

Mack: in a sense. Yeah. But it's happening extremely slowly because back then you had to, you know, like it took eight hours, I believe, for the computer to slowly spit out this 30 minutes of, of the actual recording that would wind on that record.

James: Any, like white noise or anything like that? Or is it

Mack: Yeah, noise generation was big part of was happening in that algorithm that that he came up

James: and

what about the,

Mack: And I think that,

Hmm.

James: Well, I don't know if it's an apocryphal story that he somehow like Teibel's own voice is kind of hidden somehow in the in the mix somewhere uh, I don't know if it's true or not.

Mack: Yeah, I've, I don't have any evidence of that from anybody who there, but we don't really very clearly. Like, uh, everything that i've sort think I've figured out about this was sort done forensically by talking to historians. You know, uh, don't know if you guys know, you guys know Benjamin Lindquist? Um, he, he just graduated. He does work on, on, um, computer speech. But he's, he's somebody that I've spoken to a lot of there, there's, uh, several people who have kind of helped me reverse engineer, um, what, what I think happened. But the fact is we don't really have very good accounts. 'cause I don't think Irv knew when you read his writing about it, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Joel: Hmm. We ran with the, um, myth in our work and, um, you know, there's a section in our environments 12 record after we tell the story, you know, that has, has, that we've just sort of talked about, and then hear a very short segment from the original record. Then on our record, we have a section that sort of addends.

To that in which the actors that we're working with emulate the sounds of the ocean with their own voices. So we wanted to sort of homage to,

Mack: Yeah, love that

Joel: Yeah, 

just to the, to the idea of, um, you know, emulation, mimicry, simulation, uh, moving back and forward between a kind of organic mimicry of, of the human voice through to this sort of early digital mimicry of, you know, extracting, um, sort of filters from sounds and gen and generating new sounds and, and so forth.

So that, uh, yeah, that the idea of reproduction is right there at

James: And maybe optimization. I there's one quote that we, I always have in mind when I think about this, which is, uh, I think it's a originally a pull quote from one of the sort of maybe real, maybe fake, um, sort of reviews of the record that, of the Environment series Thatty published on the back of the record sleeves where it says something like 'better than the real thing'.

And that became a kind of refrain for us, the idea that like, you know, this wasn't just the, an ocean sound. It wasn't just that, um, you know, he had to, he had, um, sort of made something that more or less approximated, uh, the sound of Coney Island. Um, but it was actually better than it. And that kind of, the idea of the optimization of nature, I think sort of felt, um, especially when you're sort of segueing into the kind of more contemporary.

Uh, cases where there is a kind of a logic of improvement optimization, the aut automation and kind of upgrade or something that we can see maybe playing out in kind of contemporary m markets, uh, in relation to sound and, but also the, the bioacoustics space.

Yeah 

Joel: Just going back to, um, the question you, you were asking about AI and I, I, I sort of agree that yeah, this, um, like origin myth. Of environments, or it's more than a, it's a true story, but the, it has blurred historical edges. Of course. You, you, you know, that was really important for us, in thinking about, um, AI as a kind of machine of reproduction simulation.

And, um, it's great that you think of artificial intelligence through the prism of William Burrows and Brian Geiser. I wish ev I wish everyone did, um, think of it that way. 'cause we, we probably have, um, a more interesting sort of environment now if that was the case. But, um, yeah, that is a really useful sort of reference for us too, because I think a number of our experiments with, you know, artificially generated sound, um, do come out of, you know, um, thinking about voice and, and language and, and cut-ups and extracting, segments of words and phrases and kind of re arranging them, re generating them in other voices, re-skinning them is the way that we have thought about, um, the use of voice clones as well.

Mack: Yeah.

Um, and then maybe, maybe that is a good segue into sort of beginning to talk in earnest about what you guys have done with the legacy of environments and this, this record. And, um, I mean, it's more than a record, it's sort of a project you have been working on for a few years now. Really, you, you've done installations around this.

Um, can you maybe give us the, the description of environments 12.

Joel: Yeah, I'll start. I'll start. Um, I won't tell the whole story. So, uh, for the, for the listeners, James is holding a record up to the camera, uh, which you won't see, but, um, it's the Environments 12 LP, um, which was recently released by, um, our friend Frederick, who runs a label in, in Brussels called Futura Resistance.

So just to say the project began as an installation work in an exhibition.

Um, it was, it's an, you know, in that context as an eight channel work. So, um, if you can imagine it, um, the setting in the installation was a, a, a kind of, modular sort of furniture that, um, may be resembled like a late sixties lounge room or something like that, you sit in this kind of curved, uh, chair and in the center, or couch.

And in the center of the space, um, is a record player, a really beautiful, seventies Hi-Fi. Um, and on the record player is a record that is just looping, uh, with a locked groove. And then, uh, scattered around, um, the, the seating area, uh, LP sleeves, um, for environments 12, you know, our record.

Um, and each sleeve has environments 12 written on the front, but has a different cover image. And then inside we had the extensive liner notes, um, which go through all of the tracks on the album, which you heard in the installation in eight channels, in a, um, diffusion arrangement.

And so, um, yeah, that work, we thought of it as also the production of a listening environment in the gallery. as well as obviously a homage to the Environment series and a notional extension of them.

Mack: Yeah,

Joel: Um,

James: I, can I maybe give a very kind of schematic overview of what it actually sounds like as a record though? 'cause people might be under the mistaken impression that it sort of sounds like an environment's record in the sense that,

Joel: Yeah. No, not at all.

James: More that it's a, it's sort of, uh, combination of environmental recordings, but also a lot of spoken word that sort of, you know, in a tradition of radio pieces.

The

 actual voices, the original voices of, of actors and, and singers and vocal performers that we had come into the studio and their clones. So the, the pieces kind of trained on itself.

We, we trained voice clones on the original recordings that. Uh, were made and so there is the, the, in so far as a story is told, there's always a slightly ambiguous kind of relationship between original reproduction, maybe optimization or kind of, um, yeah, sort of, uh, synthetic, you know, strange, uh, uh, mirror image.

And so the, the, the, we, we tell, you know, the story of the Environment series. We play some recordings from the Environment series. There's one story called Reef Lullaby, which is about the, the attempt to, um, play optimized compute computationally optimized sounds back into coral reefs in order to heal them.

​

James: Um, um, there's

Joel: Yeah, there's a stop.

There's a 

Mack: the, that's the, the concept of

James: enrich.

That's right 

Mack: right?

Joel: But that concept, um, we, you know, I think as James mentioned, I think that was, um, one of the first ideas, um, that we really latched onto in this project. And, and you know, 'cause we were obsessed with this idea of, a speaker array installed on the coral reef, you know, playing the sounds of a healthy reef back into sort of a degraded one.

And it almost felt like an Alvin Lucier sort of composition or

James: I find it very melancholic as well. Like there's something sort of, i don't know, like it's sort of amazing and ambitious, but also sort of so sad. Just that image that like the reef can only be sustained by sort of playing its own song back into it to try to heal it, you know?

Joel: Hmm.

Mack: and can you talk a little bit more about, about that process? Like who actually carried. This out, this idea placing speakers around a reef and basically, if I am understanding it correctly, they're, they're playing recordings of the sounds of a healthy reef, those sounds to the to an unhealthy reef under the, hope that somehow this is gonna cause the reef to regenerate.

James: Um, that's exactly right. I'm just gonna find the name of the, the scientist, um, so I don't get it right, wrong. He is a bio acoustician called Steve Simpson, um, who pa.

Joel: And, and Timothy Lamont. 

James: But, but Steve Simpson I think is the coiner of this idea of acoustic enrichment. He'd been doing it for a long time, um, playing the sounds of the ocean back into the ocean and working specifically with reefs.

And it's only laterally that he comes to the kind of computational version. And Timothy Lamont is one of his PhD students who then was sort of seconded to Google for a while to help develop, um, the kind of, um, souped up computational version of acoustic enrichment. And so, um, some of the sounds that you hear in the piece, um, are recordings made by Timothy Lamont on the reef.

Um, the dataset that he produced, um, of reef sounds with a view to playing, not just recordings, which is what Steve Simpson had originally done, but somehow like optimized or tailored or, yeah, the reef, this idea of the reef mega mix, the specifically tailored 'cause all reefs are different, right?

You have to always have the, the right sounds for the right mix, for the right reef. And so I don't think that that's been realized, but there's a kind of an idea or maybe it's an ideology or a kind of imaginary or something of a sort of cybernetic system whereby, the, you know, the, the recordings of the reef come out are taken up by a computer or an automated system and then optimized and played back into the reef in order to heal the reef.

That is the logic that really had something in common in our thinking with the Environment series. And, um, it's not just, uh, in.

Mack: And it just, and just to, just to sort of spell that out, right, like, because I think this is really brilliant. I I, and I'm pretty blown away that the way you guys made this connection and turned it into this recording, which I find really affecting. But I mean, Teibel's concept was you could use the phonograph as a kind of cybernetic technology of the self. You know, if Foucault talk talked about the technologies of the self as sort of like in late capitalism, people use technologies to kind of discipline themselves because we're no longer in kinds of regimes where there's people telling you what to do we're in this sort of entering neoliberal era by the seventies where you know, allegedly we're all free in this free market do whatever we want, but that creates all kinds of new pressures. We have to be in charge of ourselves and we have to withstand the sort of destruction of the social contract and like the lack of community and everything.

And so we, we turned to these kinds of technologies to help us withstand the pressures of what capitalism has done to our society. The way it's sort of degraded, our society turned it into this reduction to a free market. And so things like Teibel's Records, they're like, okay, we're using 

the phonograph as a tool to help bring nature back into the picture in an urban environment and to help bring relaxation back into the subject. This notion of playing music for the reef. It's like you guys have like flipped the script and it's like, well now we're using this computer generated music to actually try to help the environment itself, which has also been destroyed by capitalism and it's so, it's like a technology of the self nature or,

James: not that this is like Foucault hour or anything, but uh, Foucault's term is environmentality. So he's talking about the ways in which we modulate our environment in order to sort of, uh, we, we address the environment rather than the self actually. And so this is a kind of a, a more, slightly more recent kind of, uh, logic of governance.

And so, you know, if you think of the smart home, um, the kind of the environmentality kind of logic would be that when you enter the room, the lights just come on. The, the environments record just starts playing. You know, the, the, the system knows better than you what you need and want.

And that logic, I think. Is really pervasive right now. Like, um, machine listening is absolutely part of it, but what I've tried to argue in some of my writing around this is that we're seeing that sort of be applied. It's an environmentality that's being sort of applied to nature and in the name of nature, a kind of preemptive, um, environmental modulation.

I mean, there are other examples like, you know, uh, I was thinking about your work on, uh, noise cancellation. One of the papers I came across, um, they talk about the, the possibility of open space, active noise cancellation, you know, so the idea would be Oh, right. Yeah, exactly. So, it's the same people, you know, that they're like, well, we can just, we've got the microphones in in nature.

Well, we can not just, um, enhance the natural environment, but also cancel unwanted sounds. And we can do that in a kind

Mack: Oh wait, people are, people are talking about doing this in

James: out in the environment.

Mack: like out

James: But again, it's like.

Mack: I'm not familiar with that. 

James: Partly, you know, so there's this one paper by this guy, Bjorn Schuller. This is the one, this is like my OG paper, because it's just pure, it's pure ideology, basically. He's just saying, it's just a list effectively of like, how can we use machine listening to save nature?

And, and he has all these kind of crazy, but I mean, sort of brilliant but crazy ideas, open space, active noise cancellation alarm systems for animals. So he says, well, um, this is something else we referenced in the record. Like, well, he says, since we can train, um, a machine learning system to recognize and speak Mandarin, even though we don't know Mandarin well, we could probably do that for animals too.

And there have been attempts to do, you know, like, uh, Microsoft I think has a, like a, a language project. What's the, the name of the big one? Joel? Um,

Joel: Um, interspecies internet.

James: So we should talk about the Interspecies internet. But, but the, you know, he says, well, what if, um, if we've got all these loud speakers in the forest anyway, um, you know, if there's a bushfire coming or some sort of threat.

We could have an alarm system for animals and we could develop it to speak in the language of the animals themselves. So, you know, um, you would have an automated system that's tracking the environment and if there's some problem, you would just speak directly to the animals themselves.

So these are the kinds of imaginaries that are going on behind the scenes here. Maybe haven't been fully realized yet, but there are people, you know, working in that direction.

Mack: Oh, that's fascinating.

James: the other thing I wanted to mention, I thought we should mention is the zoo project, the zoo dimension this, because, um, it's not like there's, you know, the Environment series and then AI. In our piece, there's this kind of really amazing, uh, intermediate point, um, involving some Australians who start developing sounds for zoos.

And I guess in our thinking for the piece. And it, it is a kind of intermediate step, um, a set the same logic in the Environment series. It's ultimately gonna leak out all the way into nature itself, sort of goes via the zoo first, but maybe Joel , you are the, you bit be better placed to describe this story than me.

Joel: Yeah, I mean, I'll, I'll start. And, there's a figure in, um, Australia who, I mean, I wouldn't say he's analogous to Teibel, but, um, is a sort of prominent field record, a guy called Les Gilbert. And, you know, the, the same time in the nineties when I worked in secondhand, you know, record stores and saw Environments, records here and there, um, there was an Australian record called, I think Dawn at Kakadu, or Dusk at Kakadu, which is a, um, a national park in the northern territory of Australia that is, um, also a sanctuary for, for wildlife.

Um, and this was a field recording, um, 

of, you know, frogs and birds and other animals. And it was, um, also a ubiquitous sort of, uh, re record in the period. And, um, the guy behind it, Les Gilbert, is someone who had spent the late seventies through to the early eighties, um, recording sounds in the Australian environment in a, a, a really thorough way.

I mean, acoustic ecology in Australia was quite a big movement too. And, um, you, you probably know that Bill Fontana spent a number of years in Australia, you know, employed by the, the, the A BC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to, um, exhaustively collect the, the sounds of the Australian continent too.

So there are a number of projects like that, but, um, someone Les Gilbert has, has passed on now. Um, but a, a close friend of ours, the composer David Ches Worth, was sort of brought in in the late eighties, early nineties to work with Les. Um, it, and it was a sort of moment where they were thinking, what, what can we do with these recordings, um, beyond just sort of presenting them as listening experience, can they be sort of instrumentalized in some other way?

And so they developed a sound design studio in the suburbs of, of Melbourne, and they started getting a lot of interest from institutions like, like zoos and, you know, w wildlife institutions. The first one was a regional institution called Hillsville Sanctuary on the outskirts of Melbourne where you, you know, they composed a soundscape from Les's field recordings that was designed to be played, you know, back to the animals in the zoo, enclosures. Um, and that sort of local example in Melbourne was really successful and it led to this studio, um, establishing a niche, which became a very profitable international niche in doing sound designs for, you know, zoos and then later for aquariums.

And the the biggest gig they ever got was the San Diego Zoo, the Gorilla Enclosure. and that's a story that we feature

Mack: Yeah.

Joel: on the record. Um, you know, because when we spoke to David Chadsworth and interviewed him about. You know, this work he described Les Gilbert traveling to Africa to record the gorillas in their natural environment and the sort of commitment Gilbert had to this sort of fidelity of the recording and the importance of its authenticity.

And then David describing, uh, how much work he had to do to sort of edit those recordings and, you know, remove sounds of cameras clicking and other tourists talking, and even Les Gilbert snoring, um, when he'd fallen asleep by the microphone. Um, and then he went on to describe to us, uh, the scale of the installation at San Diego Zoo, the Gorilla tropics, uh, installation, which included, I can't remember how many, but something like 90 speakers, um, which were fed from a giant bank of networked CD players that were then distributed all throughout, the zoo.

Um, and, um, had a random playback dimension that meant that the soundscapes that have never exactly repeated. And you know, this, the idea was, uh, obviously to enhance the experience of zoo goers um, by encountering the gorillas alongside something that felt like a natural soundscape. But there was also this adjacent idea that the gorillas themselves would respond positively to the sounds of their natural environment.

And there were even some studies done, you know, by zoologists to, to, to that effect, which, which were inconclusive. Um, but we really liked this, um, story. It happens in the nineties, so it's kind of in the midpoint between the original Environments, kind of conception and let's say the contemporary sort of, um, situation.

We, we have now that, that the zoo is a kind of bridging technology or a site in which certain logic of sonic reproduction, um, becomes possible at, at, at a certain moment. Um, and one aspect of that story that we really loved was that I think the San Diego Zoo installation happens in 1991, and apparently those sounds are still playing in 2025, still on their, on their loops.

Mack: Yeah. All right. Well thanks. joining me. This has been a lot of fun.

And that's it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks to James Parker and Joel Stern of machine listening. You can learn more about them and their many projects at Machinelistening.exposed. If you want to get that extended version of this conversation, including our recommendations on things to read, listen to and do.

Just go to phantom pod.org to join Also. Go there right now and sign up for that new Phantom Power Newsletter. I'm super excited about this newsletter. I think you're gonna like it. Phantompod.org. Today's show was expertly crafted in the United Kingdom by Cameron Naylor. Thank you, Cameron. Our outro music is by the wonderful sound scholar, Alex Blue, AKA blue, the Fifth.

I'm Mac Hagood. Our next couple of episodes are going to be great. Um, I've got an amazing round table on African music and technology coming up, and then we've got a one-on-one interview with Gabriel 

Solomon, Mendel Artist Sound Scholar, and one half of the Legendary Noise Group. Yellow Swans. Okay, take care.

Bye.