Aural Speed-Reading: Some Historical Bookmarks

135.2 ]

theories and methodologies

mara mills and jonathan sterne

1 MARA MILLS is associate professor in the FIG. Department of Media, Culture, and Com- Wisconsin School for the Blind, in Janesville, ca. 1953. munication at New York University, where she cofounded and codirects the Center for We write the history of aural speed- reading and time- stretching tech- Disability Studies. Her book On the Phone: nology in two tracks, taking a cue from Annemarie Mol’s The Body Hearing Loss and Communication Engineer- Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, with its “upper text” and “sub- ing is forthcoming from Duke University text” that invite readers “to invent a way of reading that works for them Press. Her Web site is maramills.org. from scratch” (ix). In the spirit of the story that opens track 1, on the JONATHAN STERNE is James McGill Profes- left, we decided to jimmy the format of the PMLA page. To differing sor of Culture and Technology at McGill degrees, each track provides context, describes events, raises questions, University. His book Diminished Faculties: and applies analytic frames. Track 1 is our narration of a series of A Political Phenomenology of Impairment is forthcoming from Duke University events recalled by Harvey Lauer to Mara Mills; the insights derive from Press. His Web site is sterneworks.org. his professional expertise and personal reading experiences. Track 2, on the right, does not benefit from the kind of omniscient sight known Together they are writing a book entitled as hindsight; it reads alongside. Think of these tracks as an animated “Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed.” The authors would like to thank and mostly asynchronous conversation among people who care about the Epistemes of Modern Acoustics group instruments of sound and reading in distinct but similarly fanatical at the Max Planck Institute for the History ways. For a cluster of historical recordings associated with this essay, of Science, the Alexander von Humboldt tune in to the Sound and Science: Digital Histories database: acoustics Foundation, Jason Camlot, Iben Have, . mpiwg - berlin .mpg .de/sets/ clusters/ aural- speed- reading. Burç Kostem, and Shafeka Hashash.

IN 1944, AT THE WISCONSIN SCHOOL FOR THE THIS ESSAY IS A CONTRIBUTION TO THE GROW- BLIND, IN JANESVILLE, A MIDDLE SCHOOL STU- ING TAXONOMY OF TECHNIQUES OF LISTENING.

dent named Harvey Lauer and a group of Although scholars still sometimes stereotype his friends returned to the boys’ dorm after listening as passive and immersive, the last history class, scheming about ways to speed two decades of cultural and historical research through the night’s reading. Their teacher on sound have shown that like any cultural had assigned several chapters in a talking practice, listening is composed of techniques, book—Ivanhoe—as an entertaining (or so the such as directive and diagnostic listening, teacher thought) supplement to their braille sequential and mobile listening, auditory textbook. Talking books, on phonograph memory, auditory accommodation, and envi-

theories and methodologies and theories discs, allowed the students to read together as ronmental sound interpretation.1 Aural speed- a group and were faster to get through than reading is a very recent technique, set against braille, but the boys were certain they could the backdrop of compulsory literacy in the hasten the task even more to minimize their United States and sound reproduction, which homework time.1 makes it possible to play back speech at a rate Before moving to the institution, Lauer beyond what any fast-talking human being lived with his extended family in Milwau- can produce. It represents one among many kee. His grandmother had a mechanical techniques of listening that were explicitly record player from the early 1920s with a theorized (sometimes invented), taught, and turntable powered by a hand- wound spring disseminated from blind schools beginning in and a sliding lever that could vary the speed the 1930s. And, most important, it legitimated up to 100 revolutions per minute (rpm). aural reading as reading, granting new tools of Talking books became available in 1934, control over pace, search, and access. around the time Lauer was born, thanks Since the invention of audio recording, to electrical recording as well as the long- auditors have noted the connection between playing records developed by the American rate of playback and pitch: accelerate the play- Foundation for the Blind (AFB), in New back and the pitch goes up, slow it and the York (Rubery; see fig. 2). When he began pitch goes down. Experiments with the play- reading these books a few years later, their back speed of turntables were crucial to the first public demonstrations of sound recording technology (Feaster, “Compass”). If the phonograph acquired a popular reputation as a medium of faithful reproduction, musicians and sound artists persistently undid that conven- tion, using the machine’s affordance for variable speed to distort the pitch of recordings and to make new sounds. An iconic example is FIG. 2 the Grammophonmusik concert performed by Readers sharing a the composers Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch talking book in the in Berlin in June 1930. Hindemith tweaked the 1930s. Photo cour- playback rate of three discs with recorded vo- tesy of the National cals and instruments (xylophone and cello), Library Service for the Blind and Print calling these trick recordings. A teenage John Dis abled, Library Cage was in the audience; nine years later, of Congress. he composed his first electroacoustic piece— 135.2 ] Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne 403 playback machines—like most new record Imaginary Landscape No. 1, for piano, cymbal, players—included synchronous electrical two turntables, and a few Victor tone records, motors and only two or three options for which were otherwise used to calibrate instru- turntable speed.2 ments or test room acoustics. Performances In the case of the first talking books, the like these prefigure practices that manipulate rate was set to 33 and 1/3 rpm. Lauer always recorded audio in real time, like turntablism, played his books on his grandmother’s old tape manipulation, and remixing (Katz 175). phonograph instead of the AFB machine. Whereas the variable speed experiments The faster he let the spring unwind, the more of contemporary musicians (and other artists, the narrator’s voice increased in pitch. Press- like film projectionists) aimed for the overall ing his ear against the horn to hear the soft distortion of sound recordings, aural speed- sounds, he could just barely make out the reading aspired to distort a talking book in words at double the speed. This is how he time without distorting its playback in fre- liked to read. quency.2 For everyday users and other technol- At the institution in Janesville, Lauer re- ogists—for instance, communication engineers calls asking his teacher if he could borrow who wanted to speed up and slow down speech an older phonograph player, to read Ivan- to save bandwidth in transmission—the rela- hoe and other schoolbooks at higher speeds tion between speed and pitch came to be un- than the fixed-rate machine allowed. The derstood as a problem to be solved, both for answer was no. So he and his friends, hop- synchronous and asynchronous audio. It ex- ing to skim through their homework, de- isted not as a technological imperative but as cided to jimmy the classroom record player. the object of a set of audile techniques (Sterne They wrapped tape around the motor shaft 91–98). Distinct from general listening tech- to increase its circumference and thus drive niques, audile techniques foreground media- the turntable faster. They wasted some time tion and issue from “the episteme of modern coming to a consensus about just how fast acoustics” (Tkaczyk). they all could read. It turns out they could A fixed speed- pitch relation would later be not quite double the speed. One problem was erroneously described as the ontology of ana- that Ivanhoe had been recorded at the Ameri- log audio by Friedrich Kittler and other media can Printing House for the Blind (APH), in theorists, who argued that analog phonographs Louisville, Kentucky, where the studios had a somehow corresponded to the nature of sonic slight echo; the drier the recording, the more time because adjusting speed also changed the it could be sped up. Negotiations completed, pitch of playback (Kittler 15; Krämer; Ernst). the boys read together at high speed for sev- Yet it turns out that analog audio has no such eral weeks until the record player broke, its limitation. Speed and pitch can vary indepen- bearings ruined by the vibrations caused by dently, techniques now called time stretching the tape. and pitch shifting. Time stretching eventually When Lauer went to college and be- became an umbrella term to describe the ac- came active in the National Federation of celeration or deceleration of playback, also the Blind (NFB), he learned that these sorts known as time expansion, time compression, of hacks had been taking place at state in- or rate adjustment (among other names). To- stitutions across the United States, where day these techniques are everywhere, but blind students everywhere longed for the re- they first existed as a set of possibilities. We turn of variable speed turntables to control offer one time line for time- stretching, pitch- the rate of their reading. It did not yet occur shifting, and audiobook technology, building to them that one day a machine might be on Aimi Hamraie’s idea of “access- knowledge” 404 Aural Speed- Reading: Some Historical Bookmarks [ PMLA

built to allow aural speed-reading without a (5; see 5–11), which privileges the knowledges coincident increase in pitch of the narrator’s developed by people with disabilities as they voice—what would later be called a “chip- use and transform technologies. munk” effect. The jimmying of record players by blind According to complaint letters and other students is another word for what we would feedback to the AFB, talking- book readers today call hacking. Disability studies is full also agitated for a standardized aural in- of stories of technological modifications by terface to facilitate speeded playback with people with disabilities, or with disability in less distortion of the resulting high- pitched mind, that led to major changes in whole fields speech. Specific demands included unembel- of practice: from the curb cuts and ramps lished recordings with even, legato narration now common in American cities and build- theories and methodologies and theories (Helms 8). Many also preferred unaffected ings, as well as the Americans with Disabili- delivery—what they called “neutral” or “in- ties Act itself (Hamraie), to closed-captioned formative” speech—in order to leave all inter- video (Downey) to the handgrips on kitchen pretation to the blind reader. tools (Williamson) to miniaturized batteries When the first talking books were re- and electronics (Mills) to universal broad- corded in the 1930s at the AFB and APH cast coverage (Kirkpatrick) to the shape and studios, long before audiobooks were avail- contours of the Internet (Ellcessor). Yet the able commercially for mainstream audi- burgeoning literature on hacking still largely ences, they employed theatrical narration conceptualizes technology access in terms of and experimental sound effects. Yet par- open or free as opposed to something that is ticular subsets of blind readers—mostly facilitated (Ellcessor), and it still conceptual- university students and employees in izes the figure of the hacker as a nondisabled, reading- intensive work environments— normate subject. Even in disability studies, quickly became dissatisfied with this ap- hacks are not usually imagined to take place in proach. Tools such as the SoundScriber, a institutionalized settings. As Gabriella Cole- dictation machine released in 1945 to allow man and Alessandro Delfanti have shown, the home recording of vinyl discs—approxi- mately fifteen minutes long—yielded a mas- figure of the hacker is heavily mythologized, sive increase in the quantity and kinds of sometimes aligned with the goals of industry materials available. The category of “talk- and capitalism, and sometimes against them ing books” had long included periodicals (Coleman 15–20; Delfanti 56–61). Scholars as well as novels and plays, but now volun- like Christina Dunbar-Hester have treated teer groups, most important among them hacking and related practices as contradic- Recording for the Blind (founded in 1948 tory, espousing democratic values while also and today known as Learning Ally), began reinscribing hierarchies of gender and class. to record assorted academic materials for Like Christopher M. Kelty’s “geeks,” disabil- blinded veterans returning to college. Some ity publics are often focused on producing of these readers wanted merely to keep up and reproducing the technical and procedural with sighted students, and not necessarily to conditions of their own existence—for in- race through their homework. stance, gaining access to the capitalist work- Talking books were intended as a sup- place—in part because they operate in relation plement to braille, which many blind peo- to disabling social and technical worlds that ple—especially those who lost their sight undermine their right to exist (35; see Piepzna- later in life—did not read; moreover, only Samarasinha). Lauer and his classmates were a miniscule proportion of the world’s ink very much hackers—driven to it as much by 135.2 ] Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne 405 print had been transcribed into braille. To technophilia as by the desire to modify a world theories and methodologies some extent, talking books were always not entirely built for them. designed for rapid reading. Expert braille In the 1940s, when Lauer faced his readers achieved speeds from 90 to 100 homework problem, phonographic playback words per minute (wpm), as compared with was standardized and consumer audio tech- 250 or so by sighted adult readers (Lowen- nologies offered fewer and fewer control- feld 14, 20). At the (supposedly) fixed speed lable options—a trend also found in radio of the playback machines, talking books and, later, in television (Shapiro; Murray). A could be read at 180 wpm (Lowenfeld 18). gramophone playing a recording of a thes- As more material became available to read pian dramatically delivering literary pas- by ear, for purposes beyond entertainment, sages at speeds that could not be altered had speed and reader control more thoroughly the ironic result of enforcing one aesthetic governed the narration and composition of mode of textual engagement—slow contem- talking books. plation—over an aesthetic shaped by more At stake was not simply the conversion pragmatic concerns. This is a classic case of of print from one format to another (ink to what Tobin Siebers calls the ideology of abil- sound) but also the conversion of reading ity, where people with disabilities are asked to behaviors from one sensory mode to an- conform to the norms of able-bodied culture other. Readers like Lauer transferred certain more rigidly than nondisabled subjects (7–11). reading habits, shared by readers of tactile In the case of fixed- playback- rate phono- embossed print and visual ink print, to the graphs, features intended to facilitate ease of medium of recorded speech—especially those use for one set of users—people listening to habits associated with so- called extensive musical recordings—introduced difficulty of reading: speed- reading, but also skimming use for another set of users—those who wanted and skipping ahead. to read by hearing. The proliferation of play- Phonography is often said to fix sound, back formats and rates only confounded this turning it into a persistent physical arti- problem, as 33 and 1/3 rpm and 45 rpm joined fact, but sound recordings must be educed the 78 rpm standard. Blind readers thus hacked to be experienced, and in that process of their phonographs in order to restore lost func- output transduction a sound recording is tionality and, in the process, showed the degree converted from a stationary, spatial object to which neither a recording nor a technology back to a kinetic, temporal one (Feaster, is ever fully finished, set, or black boxed. Pictures). How to treat an ephemeral sound Imagine having to read this entire es- wave as a page? How to navigate on that say in Desdemona or some other highly ex- page, or speed through several pages, with- pressive font.3 For many readers, it would out changing the speech sounds themselves? interfere with the standard techniques of aca- Aural speed- reading is something distinct demic reading (beyond, even, our two- track from simply listening to words at high approach). This was essentially the problem speed. To read entails a measure of control with early talking books: they were produced (scanning, searching, perusing) that does as theatrical enterprises, with the assumption not take place when listening to words in that the listener would want to pay attention conversation. Nor is aural speed- reading to the subtleties and expressiveness of the nar- identical to listening to any kind of high- rator’s voice. But blind speed- reading required speed sound. Nonverbal sounds—those that the opposite assumption about what listeners do not require decoding—can often be sped would want: an easy sonic “font”—a flatter up with less appreciable distortion. (In fact vocal affect—that did not call attention to 406 Aural Speed- Reading: Some Historical Bookmarks [ PMLA

some types of noise can be sped up with- itself and that allowed the auditor to skim, to out any change apparent to a listener’s ear easily find chapter and section headings, and at all.) to move through the text at different rates. In the early 1970s, decades after leav- Lauer’s homework problem was thus at ing the Wisconsin school, Lauer became once cultural, technical, and aesthetic. It was one of the test subjects for the Varispeech, a cultural because he was compelled to read the so-called time compression device designed texts. Schoolwork sits at the juncture of struc- by Francis F. Lee, an engineering professor ture and agency, alphabetization and acts of at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- reading (whether acts of simple phonics or long ogy (MIT) whom he met at a conference for duration; consciously felt or instinctively per- instructors of the blind in Florida. Lauer formed; undertaken alone or in groups). Like

theories and methodologies and theories was by then the technology transfer special- other American pupils, Lauer was required to ist for the Veterans Administration (VA) learn grammars and read canons. And like all hospital outside Chicago, and he volun- students, he regularly failed to do so. He re- teered himself and a dozen of his students— belled in small ways: skipped passages, read blinded war veterans—after hearing Lee’s against the grain; let ears and hands wander; presentation about a new electronic tape malingered; and pretended to have read. Nev- player that converted recorded sound into a ertheless, reading for disabled children in state stored signal, which could then be sampled institutions was especially compulsory, home- at a rate determined by the user, pulling out work without the relief of home. And unlike and discarding a miniscule fraction of a sec- normate students, Lauer experienced massive ond with each sample so that the tape could structural constraints, including underfunded be sped up without any change in pitch or education and deprivation from environmental loss of intelligibility. text, which were pinned by doctors and teach- Other researchers had also been explor- ers on so- called personal shortcomings. ing electronic solutions to accelerate and Institutionalization was a complex and slow down audio playback during the years ambivalent part of blind adolescence in when talking- book readers were hacking American culture. Law and civil code segre- their phonograph players. In Germany in the gated people with disabilities from the rest of 1930s, Edward Schüller developed a commer- the population even as pedagogy insisted on cial tape machine for the Nazis that decou- integrating them (Schweik). Institutionalized pled pitch and playback rate, and the Jewish blind children at midcentury were the object engineer Berthold Freund came up with a of rehabilitative practices aimed at rendering way to achieve the same effects for sound on them productive citizens, of which literacy was film, though he did not live to see his work an important part (Rose; Davidson 55–79). In come to market. After World War II, Den- 1929, the Encyclopedia Britannica listed “in- nis Gabor in the United Kingdom, Douglas ability to read” as “the greatest handicap” of Fairbanks in the United States, and Anton blindness, superseding navigation and self- Springer in Germany developed more reli- care (Fraser 721). Across all these examples, able machines for decoupling playback rate blindness began to be defined by exclusion and pitch. While still incredibly expensive, from ink print, necessitating alternative read- these machines began appearing in Ameri- ing technologies, which could never quite live can schools for the blind in the early 1960s, up to the ink-print ideal. and research into rate- adjusted reading be- Lauer’s experience also binds literacy to came a national field of study by the middle technical concerns. On the one hand, he was of that decade. Even so, devices like these just another school kid with assigned readings 135.2 ] Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne 407 were not things most individuals could own to get through. On the other, the speed of play- theories and methodologies or use at home.3 back was a new sort of problem to be overcome. Lee’s Varispeech, patented in 1972, In science and technology studies, the “appro- worked with compact cassette tapes as an priation” of technology by “users” can be a alternative to the cumbersome and expen- matter of interpretation or construction: as- sive reel-to- reel tape machines and attach- signing a new meaning to an object, finding a ments then in use (Lee, “New Promises” new use, or changing its very assembly (Eglash 135; see fig. 3). The Varispeech could be et al.). Aural speed- reading entailed all three. used for either time compression (speed- Lauer’s experience also requires that we ing up) or time expansion (slowing down, rethink common aesthetic understandings which otherwise turned recorded speech of literature. As classic works by Lawrence into a growl). Lee’s company, Lexicon, went Levine, Gerald Graff, John Guillory, Ian on to become a leader in the field of audio Hunter, and others argue, literary reading in and studio technology, not only for the school was part of the broader project of lib- Varispeech but for a variety of digital re- eral subject formation. It was also prepara- verberators. It won an Emmy in 1984 and tion for a daily deluge of contracts and forms, a technical Grammy in 2014. Time com- instruction manuals, signs, Bibles, and tele- pression and expansion eventually became phone books. “Pragmatic and disciplinary” standard features in audio recording and frameworks are thus needed to understand editing software. the aural speed-reading of literature, which in The Varispeech also had a setting that al- turn requires abandoning a more romantic at- lowed one to adjust the pitch of the record- tachment to any inherent aesthetic, moral, or ing without changing the length of playback leisure value of literary production (Robson time (in other words, the reverse of time 10). Practical relationships to texts have aes- stretching), and for this reason it is known thetic dimensions and may lead to new kinds as the first commercial pitch shifter, preced- of aesthetic results, but they do not follow the ing Auto- Tune by more than twenty years. conventions of traditional literary aesthetics— they require us to think differently about the modalities of reading as well as the modalities of attention (Have and Pedersen). Counterintuitively, novels were easy for blind students to read, whereas short, ephemeral, and seemingly simple texts—e.g., la- bels, mail, manuals for household and workplace tools, money, gov- ernment forms, and street signs— were at once urgent and rarely transcribed into braille or sound. Novels were roomy and had redun- dancy, as contrasted with the unfor- FIG. 3 giving binary of the +/- painted on Image of the Varispeech I, from a pamphlet that advertised it as “a a battery, the analog stringency of remarkable new tape recorder for time compression and expansion.” numbers on a thermometer, or the Pamphlet courtesy of Harvey Lauer, in the collection of Mara Mills. word-for- wordness of a recipe. Yet 408 Aural Speed- Reading: Some Historical Bookmarks [ PMLA

Pitch- shifting and time- stretching techniques novels required less time and concentration to were quickly taken up by the radio and televi- read than other books, regardless of format— sion industries, and by musicians and DJs and they were often consumed in a sitting, because film sound designers. they did not demand rehearsal, memorization, Lee’s early public statements in the 1970s rereading, or problem solving. In talking-book describe the Varispeech as a device designed form, as Matthew Rubery points out, novels “for the aged and visually handicapped,” could be read while one was engaged in other with whose reading practices Lee was inti- tasks (229). Many avid readers like Lauer, who mately familiar from his prior work at MIT went to college and graduate school after leav- on text- to-speech reading machines (Lee, ing the state institution, preferred genres of “Time Compression” 738). Lee intended the long-form reading beyond the novel—as an Varispeech to enable blind people to over- adult Lauer took great pleasure, despite the ef- come a number of drawbacks, articulated by fort, in technical reports, compilations of sci- talking-book readers themselves: ence news, lyrics books, and other nonfiction. This aligns with the latest work on ink- The reading by listening rate is set by the rate print reading practices by Leah Price, who at which the original speech was produced, shows that casual reading was as common a normally around 110–175 words per min- mode of engagement with texts as deep read- ute. The second drawback is that the speed ing—in either case, it could be a pragmatic ac- of listening is paced completely by the re- tivity rather different from the romantic idea of cording. One cannot skip sections or scan immersed literary reading. This combination an audio recording similar to skipping and of disciplinary structure, missions of subject scanning a printed text. formation, and functional literacy was the con- (Lee, “Time Compression” 738) text to which the Encyclopedia Britannica was pointing when it singled out access to print. Thus, readerly protocols for talking- book The emerging technique of aural speed- narrators, and the speed listening they fa- reading was no doubt encouraged by the cilitated, set the stage for time stretching in broader cultural imperative for visual speed- the era of magnetic tape. In other words, the reading in the same time period. Speed is one technique of aural speed-reading preceded of the central tropes of industrialization, closely the technology for audio time compression— linked to efficiency, and a number of media as in many other moments in the history of theorists and book historians have examined sound, the practice precedes its mechaniza- the rhetoric and apparatuses of visual speed- tion. Blind readers soon became test sub- reading that emerged around 1900. Nicholas jects and a consumer market for commercial Dames, for one, argues that psychophysics re- time- stretching machines, but they had al- searchers in Germany and the United States ready established aural speed- reading as a at the end of the nineteenth century began to listening technique, and they had made sig- positively correlate skimming to reading com- nificant progress in altering the conditions of prehension and intelligence—the faster the bet- playback, both in terms of hardware and the ter, if done without any wasteful eye motions. voice interface. As Judith Wajcman argues, anxieties Talking- book readers created a social about the pace of life—the speeding up of pull for time-stretching technology, but, production, transportation, and communi- more important, the aspiration to separate cation and the concomitant speeding up of playback rate from pitch in aural speed- human behavior and experience—date at reading became a generalized technique, one least to the beginnings of industrialization. 135.2 ] Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne 409 that underpins (and in fact propels) the con- The value of efficiency, so central to indus- theories and methodologies trolled temporal and pitch-based manipula- trial capitalism, motivated time saving in the tion of sound today, from pitch correction workplace (things like the division of labor software like Auto- Tune and Melodyne, to and scientific management)—and yet saved vocal special effects, to dubbing, to tempo time seemed to open new avenues for pro- matching for musical mash-ups, to time ductivity instead of granting more leisure. As stretching that fits movies into established Wajcman shows, the sense of time pressure broadcasting time windows. today is caused as much by multitasking, and Lauer was not only a tester for the Va- the spillover of the productivity ideal into lei- rispeech, he was also effectively a collabora- sure practices, as it is by the simple accelera- tor with Lee, advising him on aspects of its tion of labor and communication. usability, sound quality, and interface. After Nonetheless, speeded reading (aural or meeting Lee, Lauer trained ten blinded vet- visual) has not always correlated to straight- erans on a single device in 1973. With seven forward speed-reading. Rather than skim, one hours of practice, they all exhibited good might skip passages in a linear way or skip comprehension at 260 wpm (1.75 times the around, in which case one is not-reading as recorded speed). In 1974, the VA purchased much as speed- reading. One speed- reads to a dozen units for veterans who were college access information; to look things up for one’s students or otherwise had reading-intensive own writing and hence slow both reading jobs. A second VA study demonstrated that and writing down; or to find one’s place after most of these veterans were able to read it has been lost, glance at a table of contents, compressed material at rates exceeding 400 flip through page numbers, or peruse an in- wpm (Malamazian and Lauer 453). In 1978, dex. Speed-reading can be a browsing of titles, Lauer was so invested in the technology that a quick-paced idling, a lazy sort of distracted he wrote the owner’s manual for the Vari- reading, or an intensely focused memorizing. If speech II. used in the service of rereading, speed-reading Nevertheless, when the Wollensak tape might be part of an overall slowdown, where the recorder that played talking books, then reader works through a passage several times. on four-track, was upgraded at the end of As everyday audiobook applications like the 1970s, Lexicon did not update the Va- Audible acquire tools for varying playback rispeech attachment. Instead, the company speed, sighted readers increasingly listen to turned to making higher-quality time com- accelerated human speech. The same thing pressors for radio, television, and other, is happening with podcasts, YouTube videos, more profitable commercial media, which and recorded university lectures. But too of- were designed to be placed in racks in pro- ten, contemporary discussions leave out blind fessional audio environments and could not readers, treating the audiobook as an autono- be attached to tape recorders. mous, sui generis piece of technology. While Lauer and other blind aural readers were braille is the format of text most often asso- left, once again, without a workable speed- ciated in the sighted imagination with blind reading device. reading and blind education, today reading by ear is far more widespread. An accomplished blind reader with access to a computer will use a screen reader like JAWS to turn printed text into spoken words, and may even play it back at a speed so fast that, to the uninitiated, it sounds more like a bee stuck in a can than 410 Aural Speed- Reading: Some Historical Bookmarks [ PMLA

NOTES a voice speaking. Speed listening is in many ways blind reading—and aural speed-reading 1. We recount Lauer’s story based on a telephone interview with Mills on 30 March 2015, as well as con- is the technique that ghostwrites today’s algo- versations Mills had with Lauer in person over the past rithms for “stretching” time-based media. several years. 2. Our account will restrict itself to the develop- ment of the industry in the United States. Only in 1961 did the American Printing House for the Blind, another publisher of talking books, begin to incor- NOTES porate variable speed once again into their playback machines. 1. See, for instance, the work of Bijsterveld on “sonic skills.” 3. The details in this paragraph are drawn from lon- 2. Both Kursell and Raz have found other examples, like ger stories we tell in our book manuscript, titled “Tuning phoneticians who wanted to control playback speed in their theories and methodologies and theories Time: Histories of Sound and Speed.” labs to alter and investigate the timbre of vowel sounds. 3. In the original version of this essay, we mentioned Comic Sans as a comparatively illegible font, only to learn that Comic Sans is in fact easier for neurodiverse people to read. See Sins Invalid 32.

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