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

For full transcript visit irv-teibels-environments-ai-audio-and-the-future-of-listening-w-machine-listening

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