Phantom Power

Phantom Power

Sound is all around us, but we give little thought to its invisible influence. Dr. Mack Hagood explores the world of sound studies with the world's most amazing sound scholars, sound artists, and acoustic ecologists. How are noise-cancelling headphones changing social life? What did silent films sound like? Is listening to audiobooks really reading? How did computers learn to speak? How do race, gender, and disability shape our listening? What do live musicians actually hear in those in-ear monitors? Why does your office sound so bad? What are Sound Art and Radio Art? How do historians study the sounds of the past? Can we enter the sonic perspective of animals? We've broken down Yoko Ono's scream, John Cage's silence, Houston hip hop, Iranian noise music, the politics of EDM, and audio ink blot tests for blind people. Phantom Power is the podcast that both newcomers and experts in sound studies, sound art, and acoustic ecology listen to--combining intellectual rigor and great audio. SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring the anomalous, the luminous, and the numinous. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions. ⁠spectrevisionradio.com⁠ ⁠linktr.ee/spectrevision⁠

Episodes

Disquiet in Tehran (Siavash Amini)

August 14, 2026 • 53 mins
Siavash Amini is an experimental composer living in Tehran, trying to live his life and hone his craft amid United States bombings and government crackdowns. Amazingly, he is still creating. August 28th will see release of his collaboration with the American theorist and poet Eugene Thacker, Songs for Sad Poets Vol. III (Hallow Ground). He’ll also soon drop a solo record, Beneath the Pine on Lawrence English's Room 40 label. ...
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Audiobook Superstar Robin Miles: The Full Interview

July 31, 2026 • 113 mins
While Mack takes a summer break, we bring you this treat from the archives: the full-members-only version of his 2024 interview with beloved audiobook narrator Robin Miles. This episode features almost an hour of additional content, including our What’s Good segment where Robin unsurprisingly makes some really great book recommendations! To get access to all our members’ content, past and future, become a member at mack...
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Noise, Tinnitus and Affect Theory: Marie Thompson Extended Interview Recast

July 17, 2026 • 87 mins
While Mack takes a summer break, we bring you this treat from the archives: the full-members-only version of his 2024 interview with the influential theorist of noise and affect theory, Dr. Marie Thompson. This episode features 40 minutes of additional content on Thompson’s research on tinnitus and hearing loss. To get access to all our members’ content, past and future, become a member at mackhagood.com.  Feminis...
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Podcasting's Politics of Empathy with Jason Loviglio

June 26, 2026 • 68 mins
Today we talk radio, podcasting, and democracy with Jason Loviglio. Jason is an expert on the history of National Public Radio and a key theorist of how audio media have changed the public sphere. He traces the politics of radio down to the smallest details, like the kinds of mics that are used, the way radio personalities use their voices, even the fan mail that comes in. In this episode, Jason Loviglio discusses everything from ...
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Digital feeds, malnourished students

June 12, 2026 • 44 mins
Today we’re doing one of our occasional episodes where host Mack Hagood talks about a new essay he’s written for our newsletter “Feed Logic and the Failure to Thrive” Mack writes that students and professors are struggling, both academically and spiritually. He tries to diagnose the issue he felt in his classrooms this year and the role technology may play in it. For new listeners, Mack is a writer and re...
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Did Moog ruin synths? Suzanne Ciani reveals analog's original sin

May 29, 2026 • 58 mins
Today  we talk to modular synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani and MIT Spatial Sound Lab researcher KamranV. Suzanne and Kamran both love quadraphonic sound, and they have a new quad release coming out on June 4th called Ciani/Orkest. They are on a mission to make quadraphonic music accessible to both musicians and to listeners, and in this interview, Kamran will explain how, you, with no special equipment, can listen to their new album in ...
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Anonymous Sounds: Library Music

May 15, 2026 • 52 mins
Today, we look at some of the hidden labor that creates the ubiquitous music that we hear all around us. Today we talk to Nessa Johnston and Jamie Sexton, co-editors (with Elodie A. Roy) of Anonymous Sounds, Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s. It's the first scholarly book that takes a comprehensive look at the early off-the-shelf music industry that soundtracked TV, movies, radio, and commercials and it argu...
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William Basinski: From 'NASA Brat' to Space Cowboy

April 24, 2026 • 41 mins
In the fall of 2001, an obscure experimental musician decided to revisit some analog tape loops he had made back in the early eighties. Inspired by the work of Steve Reich, Brian Eno, and Robert Fripp, William Basinski had created his own distinctive practice of taping easy listening music off the radio, cutting the tape into loops, roughly a foot long, and then slowing it way down. The result transformed music into something prof...
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How to Listen Like a Fish with Marine Biologist Sophie Nedelec

April 10, 2026 • 56 mins
Do fish have ears? What is the nature of underwater hearing and how does it differ from hearing in the air? If humans are the evolutionary descendants of ocean creatures, do we retain any fishy traces in the way we hear the world? And what about all the noise we humans make in our oceans? If we want to save the planet, do we need to learn to listen like the fishes once again? Today we explore these questions with Marine biologist a...
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Talking Back to the “The Oral Theory of Everything”

March 27, 2026 • 40 mins
Why does a sixty-year-old media theory resurface in the media every few years, while journalists ignore the great communication scholarship that has emerged in the meantime? More importantly, what effects does antiquated thinking have on the public understanding of our current digital discontent? In this episode, Cameron Naylor interviews our usual host, Mack Hagood, about his recent newsletter, “Oral Residue: A Zombie Media ...
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The Internet Promised Creative Freedom. What Happened?

March 13, 2026 • 50 mins
Creativity doesn’t come out of thin air–it evolves in relation to the communities around us and the tools available to us. Some of the most common forms of everyday creative works–memes, podcasts, vertical videos–barely existed a couple of decades ago. And obviously, we can’t ignore the changing economics of creative industries, which wield an outsized influence over what kind of work gets made. Today...
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What makes a podcast great? Legendary producer Julie Shapiro shows us.

February 27, 2026 • 47 mins
Today we go on a listening tour with audio legend Julie Shapiro, who has helped define what radio and podcasts could be over the past 25-plus years. Shapiro co-founded the Third Coast International Audio Festival, one of the most prestigious and influential awards in audio. She was a longtime executive at PRX Radiotopia, home of shows like Song Exploder, Kitchen Sisters Present and Everything is Alive. She helped launch and executi...
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Noise, power, and Minneapolis: Gabriel Mendel interview (Part 2)

January 30, 2026 • 51 mins
The year is off to a very disturbing start thanks to ICE’s violent paramilitary incursion in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Minnesota citizens have responded with mass protests and direct action, much of it sonic in nature—with the sound of whistles alerting neighbors and making life harder on ICE.  This episode, we speak with an expert on noise, power, and protest who also happens to live and teach in Minneapoli...
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Gabriel Saloman Mindel Pt. 1: Yellow Swans, Noise, and the Art of Pushing Boundaries

December 26, 2025 • 63 mins
Gabriel Saloman Mindel is a lot more than one half of the United States best known noise bands. He's also an interdisciplinary artist and a scholar whose research studies the interplay between sound and power, as he theorizes how noise can push the limits of the body in struggles over space and political autonomy.  Gabriel has an MFA from Simon Fraser University and a PhD in the History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz. He...
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African Music Technology: Branding, Identity, and the Global Music Market w/ Kingsley Kwadwo Okyere, Louise Meintjes, and Reginold Royston

November 28, 2025 • 62 mins
Today host Mack Hagood is joined by three remarkable scholars whose work sits at the intersection of African music, technology, and culture. Dr. Louise Meintjes is Marcello Lotti Professor at Duke University. She's a distinguished ethnomusicologist whose groundbreaking research on South African music has transformed how we understand the recording studio as a site of cultural negotiation and creative production. Media anthropolog...
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Irv Teibel’s Environments, AI Audio, and the Future of Listening w/ Machine Listening

October 31, 2025 • 55 mins
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.  M...
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Horror Film Sound Designer Graham Reznick on Crafting the Uncanny

September 26, 2025 • 61 mins
Graham Reznick is a multifaceted sound designer, screenwriter, director, and musician, best known for his work on indie horror films like Ti West's X and the critically acclaimed video game Until Dawn. In this episode, Reznick discusses Rabbit Trap, a film based on Welsh folklore blending analog synthesis with supernatural soundscapes.  Host Mack Hagood and Reznick begin talking about horror sound design a...
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Maurice Rocco: Race, Queerness, and Thai Music Culture w/ Benjamin Tausig

August 29, 2025 • 81 mins
With movie star looks and a raucous piano style, Maurice Rocco made a splash in the 1940’s, influencing future rock and rollers Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. By the 60s, however, he was a has-been in the U.S., playing lounges in Bangkok, Thailand until his grisly murder by a pair of male sex workers. In his deeply insightful book ⁠Bangkok After Dark, ethnomusicologist Benjamin Tausig reclaims Rocco’s for...
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Phantom Power Trailer

August 13, 2025 • 2 mins
Sound is an invisible force that most people rarely notice and barely understand. Dr. Mack Hagood explores the world of sound studies with the world's most amazing sound researchers, artists, and designers, as well as musicians, writers, voice actors and others. We've broken down how computers learned to talk, Yoko Ono's scream, John Cage's silence, chopped and screwed cassette tapes, the politics of EDM, film soundtracks, field re...
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Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier on Critical Listening (Ciritcal Listening By Liz Pelly, and Max Alper)

June 27, 2025 • 76 mins
This month, we have a guest pod in the feed: It’s the debut episode of Critical Listening, music technology criticism from journalist Liz Pelly and composer-educator Max Alper, “two lifers of the Northeast underground and independent scholars of streaming era dystopia.” Liz and Max’s guest is Greg Saunier, drummer and founding member of long-running band Deerhoof. They discuss the release of Deerhoof’s...
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