Section 1: The Advantages & Disadvantages of Audio/Sonic Mediums & Recordings

1.1 - Sound & Academia

As a radio documentary that communicates knowledge, meaning, and feeling entirely through various sounds and types of speech, The Pocket Desert presents its content using an approach that often greatly differs from the communication of information and knowledge in Western academic institutions. Formal writing styles in structured papers and essays often take priority in Western academic institutions as static and depersonalised means of presenting knowledge and information. Universities and other degree-granting institutions have “firmly established protocols and practices for what constitutes valid scholarship that act as normative frameworks for modes of presentation” that follow a particular criteria (Chapman and Sawchuk 6). These institutions consistently use and impose metrics “to measure and evaluate academic research across disciplines” and continuously introduce new barriers and methods that maintain and enforce strict and limiting forms of standardisation (6-7). The standardisation and limiting metrics ultimately lead to the dismissal and delegitimization of vital voices and creative/artistic modes of presenting research and knowledge, such as those heard in The Pocket Desert. Projects and studies which “integrate a creative process, experimental aesthetic component, or an artistic work as an integral part of the study,” such as sound work, are revealed to be essential components of many academic practices as well as a way of presenting research and knowledge (6). However, these creative projects are often delegitimized or neglected in favour of Western academic standards. Despite the possibilities sound work carries and the growing field of sound study, many Western academic institutions and fields continue to overlook and disregard audio and sound as ways of communicating information with the prioritisation of written text.

Neglecting sound and audio archives in Western academia has ultimately led to a dismissive cycle and the introduction of barriers that render audio archives and recordings like The Pocket Desert as illegitimate sources of scholarly work and largely inaccessible. As Tanya Clement reveals, audio files and archives “are only marginally accessible for listening and almost completely inaccessible for new forms of analysis and instruction in the digital age” (401). Despite having “digitized hundreds of thousands of hours of culturally significant audio artifacts” and the development of “increasingly sophisticated systems for computational analysis of text and sound,” there remains “no provision for these uses in the humanities” (403). Even with great efforts from scholars and academics to develop and host necessary tools and spaces, the underestimation of sound’s possibilities and uses within institutions correlates with the lack of adequate technology and resources to properly digitise, preserve, and catalogue audio recordings (402). The widely-accepted technology used today is often not sufficient enough or intended for the study of sound. Contemporary technology used for accessing and disseminating sound, such as spectrographs, electroacoustics, the MP3, and the iPod, have not been “developed within the context of developing communication and sound technologies” unlike technologies that were specifically made to record, transmit, reproduce, and broadcast the voice, such as phonographs, telephones, radios, and telegraphs (403). Consequently, the oversight of sound’s significance and requirements for proper access can result in limited use of audio collections and archives in institutions, thus impacting allocations of funding for libraries and archives and feeding into the condemning disregard for audio and sonic research, study, and knowledge (402). However, as this project seeks to demonstrate, it is crucial for sound and audio recordings, such as those heard in The Pocket Desert, to be better recognised and resourced as a legitimate way of communicating research and knowledge in order for significant meanings often limited through Western notions of scholarly text to be understood.

The exclusion of sound and audio mediums from Western principles of research and production of knowledge inherently limits its accessibility and study while also contributing to colonial efforts of delegitimizing Indigenous epistemologies and pedagogies, which are often embedded in oral histories and storytelling. Western classrooms and academic settings were not constructed with Indigenous pedagogies in mind, and as writing, written literature, and peer-review processes are fundamental in Western academia, Indigenous ways of knowing (particularly through storytelling and oral histories) cannot truly be articulated within traditional Western frameworks, structures, and standards (Gone 50). Rather, Canadian education and academic institutions in particular, were deliberately structured and offered no other options for Indigenous Peoples than assimilation into a “settler colonial academic status quo” and often continue attempts at erasing Indigenous worldviews (Gahman and Legault 50-1). Consequently, the “epistemological differences between Indigenous and academic ways of knowing might be fundamentally irreconcilable in the context of university-based knowledge production for almost any academic field of inquiry” (Gone 46). Along with the blatant colonial structures of Western and Canadian academic institutions, the prioritisation and privileging of static, scholarly, formal, written, and standardised texts that is continuously enforced over myriad other ways to communicate knowledge, such as through sound, applies restrictions and limits on the accumulation and understanding of knowledge while actively marginalising essential voices.

The Pocket Desert radio documentary is an example of how sound and audio can communicate vital knowledge and how sonic elements can be essential to making meaning, especially in regards to the Okanagan. Despite being broadcasted solely through an audio format, the combination of voices from interviews, song, and storytelling accompanied by music and the sounds of natural elements from the land and motorised vehicles and machines allow listeners to experience and engage with multiple significant details and components of the documentary’s concerns that may not have come into fruition through visual and written text. Further, The Pocket Desert demonstrates how Western standards of communicating research and information can be disseminated and understood through audio and sonic formats. At several points throughout the documentary (such as identified by annotations 2.1 and 2.3), Dr. Geoffrey Scudder and Dr. Jeannette Armstrong provide insight and explanations regarding the Okanagan’s climate and ecology that are articulated using academic diction and tone. The more formal delivery is encompassed by necessary creative alternatives that amplify and arguably produce more opportunity for in-depth and personal understandings, such as through poetry, music, song, storytelling, and anecdotal accounts (such as identified by annotations 1.1, 3.1, 3.3, 4.1, and 4.2). While static and visual texts that do not involve sound may be capable of presenting many of the ideas and meanings conveyed throughout The Pocket Desert, an analysis of sound and the use of audio recordings will highlight the relevance and importance of sound and oral histories in understanding the unique aspects and meanings presented through the radio documentary.

1.2 - Sound, Context, & Feeling

Like The Pocket Desert, audio and sonic mediums and recordings are often not accompanied by visual or tangible elements. While that may be restricting and spur even more questions or uncertainties to a listener’s understanding, audio and sound often carry myriad possibilities and insight unattainable from other mediums. Similar to how Jason Camlot demonstrates how sound and literary audio recordings can often seem “strangely disconnected or fugitive” from the context in which they were made in Phonopoetics (2019), the radio documentary presents sounds without their original sources and distant from the time they were recorded (2). Through recordings, sounds and voices––such as the chirping of crickets and the conversations with speakers––are heard without their “social and material contexts” when they are listened to by viewers in their own immediate spaces (3). Because many earlier sound recordings “come to us as ‘fugitive’ signals from another place, increasingly via digital media,” they are “stripped of their own informing spaces, situations, and reasons, and ripped from their original media formats” in order to be repeatedly presented regardless of space and time (3). In the case of The Pocket Desert radio documentary, viewers could tune in to CBC from anywhere the channel was accessible in the mid 1990s and hear the sounds of crickets, water, music, and other sound effects along with the voices of people they could not see. Hearing the “disconnected or fugitive” voices and sounds may offer a particularly strange experience as The Pocket Desert brings elements of a place, people, and concerns into their space without anything visual or tangible. However, the sound effects (such as the recurring sound of crickets and lapping water) can be attributed to a material source, which “suggests a tangible source for the sound” that can be visualised and imagined (2). Even without any visual or tangible elements, the sounds heard throughout The Pocket Desert create meaning by evoking associations to things that cannot be seen or felt. At the same time audio recordings present sound free from its original source and time, they often also present “the body behind coherent talk and speech” and a sense of presence through laughing, stuttering, thoughtful and quizzical pauses, sighs and audible breaths, singing, whistling, and other mundane sounds that disrupt depersonalising formalities of linear narrative (see annotations 1.1 and 1.2) (45-6). Despite being amidst more formal dialogue segments in The Pocket Desert, the presence of the speaker is detectable through the sounds of their breaths, occasional stammer, laughter, pauses, fluctuations in tone, and so forth, providing listeners with context often inaccessible through written text.

The discernable and unique aspects of speech from each of the speakers in The Pocket Desert has the ability to serve as a critical tool for listeners to make meaning and engage with the ideas being presented in a more personal way. Hearing and engaging with voice in audio recordings and its “prosodic elements such as rhythm and tempo, pitch and intonation” allows listeners to make meaning that may otherwise be unattainable by other texts and mediums that lack sound (Clement 406). These prosodic elements, which are critical to studying human behaviour, culture, and society, “reflect affect and emotional engagement, as well as age, cognitive process and development, ethnicity, gender, and region” (406). Throughout The Pocket Desert, listeners hear from several speakers who bring a range of unique perspectives and knowledge using their distinct voices. There are moments of laughter, pauses, and side conversations (see annotations 1.2, 3.1, and 4.1) as well as moments where frustration and sadness are laced in the voices of the speakers and audible through raised or low pitch, with stammering, stuttering, and mumbling (see annotations 2.3 and 3.3). As demonstrated in the poetry read aloud by Dr. Jeannette Armstrong near the beginning and the end of the documentary, prosodic elements are especially pertinent to poetry and other literary works as the sound traits make meaning by indicating “‘the general trajectory of words, the large movements of syntactic play, the rhythms, which remain as much the meaning of the poem as it does its semantic content’” (see annotations 1.1 and 4.2) (Michael Davidson qtd. in Clement 406). The reading of the poem near the beginning, with the fluctuations in tone and steady rhythm, clearly emphasises and indicates many of the critical themes that are explored throughout The Pocket Desert from a personal point of view of the speaker (see annotation 1.1). Including the poem again in its entirety near the end of the radio documentary in the same tone and rhythm reasserts the themes and meanings in the context of what listeners have since heard and reaffirms the personal nature of the content and concerns discussed (see annotation 4.2).

By providing audible context to make meaning, voice and sound work together to evoke sensibility and feeling imperative to understanding and making sense of the many meanings, messages, and concerns expressed and conveyed throughout The Pocket Desert. In examining sound recordings of stage monologues and performances based on written texts, Camlot states that sound recordings have the ability to function as “intensive enactments of the real feeling and message” meant to be captured by the readers of the original text (87). Dr. Jeannette Armstrong’s reading of her poem near the beginning and the end of The Pocket Desert demonstrates how the sound recording of her voice utilises the prosodic elements to emphasise certain words, lines, verses, and elements of the poem to make meaning and therefore represent and stimulate feeling (see annotations 1.1 and 4.2). Similarly, Delphine Derickson’s voice carries similar emphasis and fluctuations in tone and pitch while she sings, allowing for feeling and human connection to be emphasised, especially as it foregrounds Dr. Armstrong’s recollection detailing her own connection to the land (see annotation 1.2). Without the fluctuation and changes in prosodic elements, voice takes on a mechanical tone that appears to be “‘without any regard to the sentiment’” and as Canon James Fleming states, “‘when we read without feeling, we are inclined to speak on one note of the voice only, in monotone’” (qtd. in Camlot 106). As revealed in The Pocket Desert, even the speakers who present their knowledge in a more formal and academic way rely on fluctuations in tone and emphasis on certain words to communicate their ideas and particular meanings, often including their own personal sentiments (see annotations 2.1, 2.3, and 3.2). Reading and speaking with feeling inherently communicates emotion, which allows the audio recordings of the speakers in The Pocket Desert to connect the ideas and meanings of the radio documentary to the emotions behind them and evoke deeper understandings.

1.3 - Sound & Time

The disconnection between a sound recording and its original contexts in The Pocket Desert frees the sound from both its material and tangible environment at the same time it frees the sound from a particular point in time. The “real-time quality of recorded sound” throughout the radio documentary ultimately “puts us into time that has already passed and opens a tunnel connection with the past” (Camlot 3). The recorded sounds in The Pocket Desert create “an experience of real-time processing” that gives listeners “the sense that the overheard time frame is somehow alive in the present, replicating the live sonic event of which it is apparently a real-time reproduction” (3). The descriptions and step-by-step instructions provided by Delphine Derickson and Lily Armstrong as they make sxʷusm (“Indian ice cream”) along with the sounds of the kitchen utensils, for example, bring listeners along with the progressing process as though they are there with them in the present (see annotation 1.2). Further, because sound recording “is a time-based medium, and we, as humans, are time-sensitive listening creatures,” sound recording “works on human perception itself, and on our perception of time, in particular” (3-4). In Dr. Jeannette Armstrong’s reading of her poem for instance, the pauses and smooth fluctuations with tone and pace in her words indicate progression in time (see annotations 1.1 and 4.2). When listening to voice, audiences can easily pick up the slowing or quickening of paces and pauses, which contributes greatly to meaning making within the context of the audio recording itself, but also when examining “how prosodic features change over time and space, how tones differ between groups of individuals and types of speech, or how one poet or storyteller’s cadence might be influenced by or reflected in another’s” (Clement 402-3). To hear The Pocket Desert radio documentary nearly thirty years since it was first broadcasted in 1995, listeners are able to experience its entirety as though the sounds being heard are happening in the moment and/or be made aware of the many similarities and differences highlighted throughout the documentary through content and presentation. The conversations and oral accounts recorded in the kitchen and out on the land (see annotations 1.2 and 3.1) as well as the detailed descriptions of the Okanagan landscape that continues to hold familiarity and relevance (see annotations 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, and 3.3) are examples of how the documentary provides life-like experiences and seemingly real-time witnessing of events recorded in the past. As will be examined in the following sections, The Pocket Desert’s ability to transcend time as a digitised audio recording is crucial in highlighting the importance of audio archives and oral histories, especially those that document ongoing issues around climate and settler colonial violence.

Photo Description/Caption: A north-facing view of Osoyoos, including orchards, roadways, mountains, and a light blanket of smoke coming from a wildfire further north near Keremeos. Photo taken August 6, 2022.

1.4 - References

Camlot, Jason. Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings. Stanford University Press, 2019.

Chapman, Owen, and Kim Sawchuck. “Research-Creation: Intervention, analysis, and ‘family resemblances’.” Canadian Journal of Communication, Concordia University, vol. 37, no. 1, 2012, pp. 5-26.

Clement, Tanya. “The Ear and the Shunting Yard: Meaning Making as Resonance in Early Information Theory.” Information & Culture, University of Texas Press, vol. 49, no. 4, 2014, pp. 401-426.

Gahman, Levi and Gabrielle Legault. “Disrupting the Settler Colonial University: Decolonial Praxis and Place-Based Education in the Okanagan Valley (British Columbia).” Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 30, no. 1, 2019, pp. 50-69.

Gone, Joseph P. “Considering Indigenous Research Methodologies: Critical Reflections by an Indigenous Knower.” Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 1, 2019, pp. 45-56.