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On Tuesday, 7 July 2026, at 10:00-12:00 BST (09:00-11:00 UTC), the Centre for Digital Inquiry (CDI) at the University of Warwick will host a livestream and workshop ‘Leviathan’s Ear: Machine Listening and Platformisation‘.
The event starts from the understanding that the voice is singular, embodied and continually changing; and where human listening involves the interpretation of many situated processes, from accent and rhythm to spatial positioning and semantics. Speech-to-text systems, by contrast, transform features of the voice into signal, often treating this wider context as noise in the pursuit of optimised outputs. Machine listening, moreover, are increasingly ambient ‘smart’ infrastructures, delivered as platform services and environmental sensing systems, which are frequently mobilised as extractive data streams for machine-learning models and predictive futures.
Auteurs from Machine Listening will join the session to discuss the technics of machine listening, including its transformative effects on labour, everyday life, aesthetics and the politics of sound.
The livestream forms part of a day-long workshop at Warwick exploring machine-listening systems, voice interfaces and questions of digital sovereignty. The workshop more broadly will explore empirically how voice is represented in machine responses, the extractive ownership of voice data and its associated features, and how cloud services, platforms, device manufacturers and other organisations are transforming the conditions through which listening becomes computational.
SPEAKERS
Sean Dockray – Co-founder, Machine Listening
James Parker – Co-founder, Machine Listening
Jonathan Skinner – University of Warwick
HOST / MODERATOR
Dr. Michael Dieter – Co-Director, CDI
#MachineListening #VoiceData #Platformisation #DigitalSovereignty