Ann Coulter<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Coulter Shock<\/i><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I
\ndownloaded a long clip, over a minute, of Ann Coulter on Hannity and Colmes<\/i>, arguing that it was "factually
\ncorrect" that Clinton "was a scumbag." What was immediately fascinating was the "cross
\ntalk" on the sample, where multiple pundits were speaking at the same
\ntime. It seems like some pundit
\nshows are nothing but cross talk.
\nCross talk is information overload. It is impossible to pay attention to two or three people
\ntalking at the same time. In the
\neffort for everyone to be heard, nobody is heard. Cross talking pundits give the impression of communicating
\ninformation while actually communicating nothing at all. I tried overlapping
\nthe sample, creating artificial cross talk into a dense texture. I like this idea, but haven’t yet used
\nit in a piece.<\/p>\n
Instead,
\nI started thinking about pundits and meaning, specifically, the difference
\nbetween Limbaugh and Coulter. Ann
\nCoulter speaks in sound bites.
\nEverything she says is designed for maximum punch in as few seconds as
\npossible. And the punch she packs
\nis astounding. What rational
\nperson would argue that it was "factually correct" that anyone was a
\nscumbag? Yet she said this about
\nClinton. And then she goes on to
\nsay that anyone who criticizes our current president is a traitor. In one clip that I use, she attacks the
\nvery notion of polls when they show low points for Bush but then, without
\npausing, attacks Kerry for polling low.
\nHer positions are, self-contradictory, indefensible and astounding, but
\nwhen she’s asked to defend them, she does, again in little sound bites. She’s impossible to argue with. It seems like any show she was on would
\ndissolve into meaningless name-calling or cross talk. And indeed, most of what she says is meaningless. <\/p>\n
Ann
\nCoulter gives the impression of communicating ideas without actually doing so.
\nHer books, comments, punditry and columns essentially say nothing but
\nRepublicans are right and Democrats are wrong, over and over again with no
\nbacking, no real evidence, nothing but puzzling and meaningless sound-bites and
\nname calling. She is incredibly
\ntalented at weaving nothing<\/i>
\ninto the appearance of something<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I
\nwrote a program that looked for pauses in her phrases and created long
\n"grains" based on her phrasing.
\nI then played out the grains in random order. I tested this using my original crosstalk laden sample. It was amazing how little the sample
\nchanged. The pretense of meaning
\nwas obscured, but the pretense was so thin to start out with that it was as if
\nnothing had been lost. When I
\nplayed the original clip (without video) for some of my comrades, they found
\nthe unprocessed version nearly as incomprehensible as the re-ordered version.
\nThen, I tried creating artificial cross talk by sometimes slightly overlapping
\nphrases. It was exactly as if I
\nhad punditry on a Television in the background and wasn’t paying attention to
\nit.<\/p>\n
I
\ndownloaded as many other files of Coulter as I could. I discovered that her voice only has a few tones. She is either sarcastic and snippy,
\nsarcastic and smirking, shrill or defensive. I could put together phrases from any of her Hannity and
\nColmes<\/i> appearances and,
\nbecause the micing was always the same, it would sound like it all came from
\nthe same appearance. The little
\nartificially constructed speeches produced by my process almost made sense. Her lack of timbral variation was as
\ninteresting and useful as Bush’s rich tones. Which is not to say that she doesn\u2019t have timbral variation,
\njust that it is much more subtle and she doesn’t have much emotional range.<\/p>\n
Like
\nwith Bush, I became fascinated by her voice. I created an 11-minute piece. The first 5 minutes start with her unaltered quote calling
\nClinton a scumbag, which is then followed with re-ordered phrases from her many
\nmedia appearances. I got the audio clips from mediamatters.org, guaranteeing
\nthat I had her most offensive comments from any of her appearances. (Also, I was unable to persuade anyone
\nto Tivo her for me, alas.) Then,
\nluckily, in the first week of October, her new book came out, thus greatly
\nincreasing the amount of source material.
\nIt was like heaven, except that my original fascination for her was
\nbeginning to turn into hate.<\/p>\n
The
\nsecond part of the piece takes a snapshot of the last pass of word
\nreordering. It then broke that
\nsnapshot in grains all of equal size.
\nThe number of grains was equal to 4 times the number of clips in the
\nre-ordering section. The play back
\nalgorithm plays back the grains in a moving window, like a cloud
\nalgorithm. On the second pass, the
\ngrains are four times smaller and the window is five times bigger. This goes on in a loop of decreasing
\ngrains and increasing window for about six minutes.<\/p>\n
The The I The This I This <\/p>\n Further <\/p>\n Coulter\u2019s At Al Her <\/p>\n 50. <\/b><\/p>\n Crimes:<\/b> Coulter plummets down the list as she <\/p>\n Smoking <\/p>\n Punishment:<\/b> Skull crushed with rock.<\/p>\n <\/b><\/p>\n <\/b>( <\/p>\n I Tag: Ann Coulter<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ann Coulter Coulter Shock I downloaded a long clip, over a minute, of Ann Coulter on Hannity and Colmes, arguing that it was "factually correct" that Clinton "was a scumbag." What was immediately fascinating was the "cross talk" on the sample, where multiple pundits were speaking at the same time. It seems like … Continue reading chapter 3 draft- ann coulter<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3354,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104\/revisions\/3354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nfirst part of this piece is inspired by countless speech remixes that are
\ncommon in politically themed popular music. These remixes are a problematic way to approach
\ndiscourse. 91Angels points out,
\n\u201c[The] challenge seems to be to reveal underlying [inconsistencies] and
\ncontradictions in the source material, as opposed to just twisting someone’s
\nwords around or trying to demonize your subject ad hominem . . .. Anyone can edit words into their
\nmouths and make them say silly things or take them completely out of context,
\nthat proves nothing and is only good for some cheap laughs.\u201d (
\nI have tried to avoid this trap by having my program make all decisions about
\nphrase order. Also, my point is not \u201cLook, I can make Coulter say something
\npointless and stupid,\u201d but rather, \u201clisten to how little this changes if you
\nrandomize it.\u201d The listener can
\ndraw her own conclusions on whether this communicates anything about the value
\nof television punditry.<\/p>\n
\nsecond part of the piece reminds me of the movies and TV shows about Max
\nHeadroom<\/i>. The movie concerns a television
\njournalist who died but then is replaced by a computer-generated talking head
\nwho can do nothing but stutter catch phrases. In the movie, the talking head is deemed an inadequate
\nreplacement for journalism. The
\ncomputer stuttering sound used by the fictional program was extremely popular
\namong children. My friends and I
\nwould try to imitate it. This
\neffect became somewhat overused in the 1980s because of Max Headroom<\/i>, but I liked it anyway as a degenerative
\nprocess. In the second part of the
\npiece any plausibility of meaning and content is destroyed. So the piece begins with a clip which
\npurports to communicate, is followed by a few minutes of remixed clips which
\nsound like they may purport to communicate, but do not, followed then finally
\nby increasingly small and scrambled grains which contain the timbres and
\npitches of speech, but none of the word content.<\/p>\n
\nfirst played in September of 2004 at Open Mic Night at It\u2019s Only Natural. Unfortunately, this time the people
\npresent were not "friendly" experiencers. They quickly became annoyed, possibly by the lack of pitch
\nmaterial. It was almost the exact
\nsame people as were in the audience for my piece with Bush and digital peaking,
\nhowever they were hostile to this one.
\nSeveral people got up and left during it. One person afterwards was explaining to me about how when he
\nwas in music school, he’d learn to craft pieces that went somewhere<\/i> and had been cautioned against distorting
\nrecorded voice.<\/p>\n
\nnext performance was in Oakland, CA at the club 21 Grand. For that second
\nperformance, I used greater diversity of source material. Coulter’s book came out in the meantime,
\ngiving her many press appearances and thus more material for me to choose
\nfrom. Instead of making the piece
\nlonger, more samples were added in at a faster rate to cause the content to
\nchange more quickly. Coulter’s
\nbook hyping created a plethora of material. I also added in a short clip of Hannity lying about Kerry to
\nincrease the non-Coulter voices and make it sound more like a pundit
\ndiscussion. Since almost all the
\nsamples come form Hannity and Colmes<\/i>, his voice was already in the piece.<\/p>\n
\ntime, the friendly experiencers were entirely people from my mailing list and
\nthe other performers playing that evening. They had entirely different expectations than did the open
\nmic attendees at ION. Also, it may
\nhave been helpful to play George Bush\u2019s Voice first, thus creating a bridge
\nbetween tonal content and tweaked word content. Fortunately, those listeners liked the piece.<\/p>\n
\nplayed the same version of the piece at a House Concert at India House for a
\nmostly grad student audience.
\nJascha Narveson heard it and invited me to submit it to the Red Festival
\nin Toronto where it was part of a \u201csound bar\u201d where friendly experiencers
\nlistened tape pieces through headphones.
\nI submitted almost the same version as the Oakland performance, except
\nthat some amplitude inconsistencies were altered with selective normalizations.<\/p>\n
\npiece was designed to change over time and it did for several months. I wanted the source sounds to change as
\nnew material became available. In
\nthis way, I hoped to extend the shelf life of the piece and be able to keep it
\ncurrent as events warrant. I began
\nto tire of Coulter, however, and have quit adding new material and end up
\nabandoning a proposed third section of the piece.<\/p>\n
\nCoulter Ideas<\/p>\n
\nstyle of speaking tends to lead to cross talk, as she attempts to shout down
\nher foes with her insane sound bites about liberals and Clinton. Most of the Coulter-containing samples
\nI downloaded from Media Matters were from Fox News, especially Hannity and
\nColmes<\/i>. This was useful because they seem to
\nmic everyone the same way every time.
\nThey set levels to reflect their ideology. Hannity, the conservative, has the loudest levels. The conservative guest, in these cases Coulter,
\nhas the second loudest micing.
\nNext is Colmes, the show\u2019s \u201cliberal.\u201d His voice is not powerful. His arguments are not powerful. His micing is low.
\nIf he were better at representing a center-right or left position, he
\nwould be fired. Al Franken found
\nthat in one representative show, Hannity spoke 2,086 words and Colmes a mere 1,261.
\n(P 84) \u201cSean Hannity is the alpha
\nmale to Alan Colmes\u2019s zeta male.\u201d (P 84), Franken noted. But Colmes is not the lowliest player
\non the show. The lowest level of
\nmicing usually goes to the liberal guest, usually someone of no significance or
\noccasionally someone who is actually not liberal at all.<\/p>\n
\nsome point, Coulter realized that she was turned up louder than everyone
\nelse. Her voice is very powerful
\nand she can be loud, so she had the power to dominate the entire show. I downloaded a clip of her
\nintentionally speaking over everyone else, saying \u201cAnd I\u2019m not going to let you
\ntalk . . .. They\u2019re not going to cut my<\/i> mic!\u201d (In later
\nappearances, her level was turned down.)
\nThis seemed like a good sample to explore cross talk, as it mostly contained
\nthat. However, during the time I
\nwas working on Coulter Shock<\/i>,
\nmy fascination with her was turning to hate. While I was assembling it, I listened to her over and over
\nagain making baseless accusations, contradicting herself and saying whatever
\nobnoxious thing popped into her head.
\nThe cross talk sample was her at her worst. I can feel my blood pressure rise when I listen to it. <\/p>\n
\nFranken spends many pages in Lies and the Lying Lairs Who Tell Them<\/i> on the problem of \u201cWhat is wrong with Ann
\nCoulter?\u201d (P 50) He explains,
\n\u201cCoulter for those of you lucky enough to not have been exposed to her, is the
\nreigning diva of the hysterical right.
\nOr rather, the hysterical diva of the reigning right.\u201d (P 5) His chapter titles express his
\nfrustration with her: \u201cAnn
\nCoulter: Nutcase\u201d and \u201cYou Know Who I Don\u2019t Like? Ann Coulter.\u201d She drives liberals crazy. Her book Slander<\/i> starts with a complaint that political
\ndiscourse \u201cresembles professional wrestling.\u201d (Coulter quoted by Franken p 9) However, Franken notes, \u201c[In] the entire 206 pages,
\nshe never actually makes a case for any<\/i> conservative issue . . .. The entire book is filled with distortions, factual errors,
\nand vicious invective . . . bolstered by [shoddy] research . . .\u201d (P 9) Franken
\nexplains, \u201cWhat Coulter writes is political pornography. She aims directly at her readers\u2019
\nbasest instincts.\u201d (P 19) Which
\nmakes conservatives love her and tremendously frustrates liberals.<\/p>\n
\nlying and unrestrained exuberance made her seem charming at first, but, like
\nFranken, I found myself pondering what exactly is wrong with Ann Coulter and
\nthen I discovered that I didn\u2019t care. Buffalobeast.com published an article, The
\nBeast 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2004<\/i>, in which they listed her as number
\n50. Their entry exactly reflected
\nhow my feelings towards her had changed.<\/p>\n
\nAnn Coulter<\/b><\/p>\n
\nslips into irrelevance. As her columns degenerate further into absurd,
\nincoherent attacks against her own personal paranoid fantasy of fanged,
\ndrooling, Saddam-loving liberals who hate America and childish France-bashing,
\nwe find our outrage slowly giving way to a baffled \u201cI can\u2019t believe I used to
\ngo out with you\u201d feeling. Her arguments are ridiculous, her vitriol forced, her
\nhatchet face even harder to look at. Still, she insulted a one-armed war
\nveteran, called reports of the hundreds of tons of missing munitions in Iraq
\nfalse, claimed Wesley Clark was pro-infanticide, and blamed Abu Ghraib on the
\npresence of women in the armed forces\u2014they\u2019re not all like you, Ann\u2014and on and
\non. It\u2019s just not worth debunking someone who has no credibility in the first
\nplace.<\/p>\n
\nGun: <\/b>Has credibility in
\nthe minds of more people than we can stomach acknowledging.<\/p>\n
\nquit downloading samples of her and went back to look at some samples of Rush
\nLimbaugh that I had lying around from earlier.
\nThis post is not Creative Commons. It is Copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins. Al Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n