We're in Conversation
- Feb 23
- 3 min read
By Νίκα Мавроди
Asking whether or not somebody has a ‘good voice’ is ableist. Had the nineteenth-century poet Percy Shelley defined “love” not as “the voice of one beloved singing to you alone” but “the sound of a lover’s voice singing to us in private,”his expectations for readers would have excluded rather than instantiated a legacy… Not commenting on discrepancy between Percy’s ability to hear and the possibility of readers disability was a gap in the literature, not necessarily means of exclusion. Understanding the poet’s audience to be futurity rather than only Mary Shelley or her father, my distinction between literary fact & its speculative error highlights his original for positing love being that which reconciles experience: presence corroborates its music, affirming beloved senses.
With the centuries since 1818, recordings proliferate our virtual bazaar in live-streaming and asynchronous modes. Disk-jockeys play singles while talkshow characters mime affect no differently whether their platform’s radio or free download. Larger budgets explain why conversation with radio personalities is accessible relative to their peers online, whose email slugs go unanswered as the last man. My idea that a media voice ought to be friend rather than celebrity is nowhere else represented, since those who aren’t jockeying for political clout maintain its regard for exclusivity.
Podcasting is continuous with blogging, which is how my voice established opportunity for audio.
Unlike teleconferencing’s collapsing production values, audio manifests novel dimension for the textile voice speaking in scrolls from a mute screen. As marketing consultant for TheFashionSpot.com boasting a devoted audience for my work specifically, I had wanted to implement a podcast thanks to preparation from Sarah Montague during her undergraduate course, Radio Documentary, but was rebuffed by the corporate budget. A lo-fi audio recording of my ‘bagel song’nonetheless made it on to the site… In the next phase of my career, Blinkist’s Simplify podcast was launched thanks to me.
“You’re going to start a podcast in California,” Ben Schuman-Stoler accused when I gave notice as if misjudging me for being an influencer growing a brand rather than an artist or female trying to survive.
Endeavoring to understand where technology mattered to my future beyond its relevance to discourse meant joining an experimental lab on Palo Alto. A postdoc initiated our collaboration for her question about what the literary agents she was interviewing meant by commenting on “voice” in reference to prose in fiction: I am listed first-author alphabetically within the scholarly publication (2021) though my contribution remains off-the-record. Changing locations during pandemonium, I returned to California in spirit via recording a meeting about her book with Mendocino College professor Lorraine Hee-Chorley in launching my own podcast, now marking a sixth season.
Informed by colleague Andrea Grant’s poetry, Magic Spells defamiliarizes the constraints of music with micro-doses of field recording, sonic collage, and lyricism. A future episode with Grant is scheduled for February, on the heels of my publishing an adjacent audio project, “Alphabet Play.”
Meditating on what has been lost from distancing society, “Alphabet Play” is the ensemble audiobook whose hook is parody of ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI). Created after noticing Google’s automated AI-voices interface permits coding scripted dialogue betwixt over 20 narrators, my 59-minute romp stars vocal artists from across the global anglophone. With local acting credits to my name, I join the production as the ‘unified authorial presence’ (Bakhtin) who reads stage directions much like ‘narrative discourse’ in a conventional novel. Finding myself thus not only a speaker but vocal artist, too, reiterated beginning terms from literary craft wherein my writing elicited sonic perception thanks to composition alone in advance of performance.
Having experimented with voice cloning on my person in lieu of scheduling a recording session at studios, next steps are to explore the technology for deceased celebrity authors — including a grandfather I never met — & publish more audiobooks (like for Andrea Grant’s forthcoming memoir BLEACH), while distributing my podcast on vinyl.
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