I recently attended an event hosted by the The New York Writers Institute with author Keach Hagey regarding her recent book on Sam Altman, The Optimist. Though I am not convinced of Sam’s motives I was pleasantly surprised at a post event dinner (that Paul Grandal and Elisabeth Gray were kind enough to include me in), to meet SUNY Albany’s AI and Society Fellow Kyra D. Gaunt PhD. Her perspectives on the AI tool set, her research on specific biases in the music industry, and in the roots of culturally driven video editing practices intrigued me so, I just had to find out more about this dynamic personality and pick her brain about the universe of things she has poured herself into.
Please state your name, current position(s) / organization(s). Can you also give us a bit of your educational background and personal path as well?
My name is Kyra D. Gaunt, PhD. I am an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in Music, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS), and Sociology.
Going to a community college, I never expected to become a professor. I am a proud graduate of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where I received my PhD in ethnomusicology specializing in black girlhood studies and hip hop as music. All of my previous degrees are in classical voice. I started pursuing a Doctorate of Musical Arts while studying with the famed tenor, George Shirley. I am a singer, songwriter and jazz improvisational vocalist. I released an album in 2007 titled Be the True Revolution, named after a line from the poem When I Die (1970) by Nikki Giovanni.
I’m originally from Rockville Maryland from a community founded in 1891 called Linkin Park. My great great grandfather was a freedom seeker from Portsmouth, Virginia, escaping the free labor slavery camps in 1855. He changed his name from Robert Irving to Sheridan Ford and landed in Springfield, Massachusetts where my grandfather and his two brothers were from before they moved to the DC Maryland area. My great great grandmother also escaped from enslavement dressed as a man around the same time and migrated to Springfield, Massachusetts as well.
I only learned this in 2014 cause it’s the kind of knowledge that isn’t passed down by word of mouth in most African-American families. So my ancestors trace their history back nine generations: see here.
You can find more information about my work on the TED Fellows Blog.
You have so much going on! Its hard to pick where to focus. That said, one of the areas that I have interest in is your writing. Can you talk a bit about that and how you came to be published? Are you still active as a writer?
When I was still young and naïve (a fledgling 19!), I had my diary invaded by my mother‘s boyfriend at the very moment I was coming-of-age sexually. I’ve never shared this publicly, but it’s what inspires my current research project for a book that will come out next year titled PLAYED: How Music, Mutes and Monetizes Black Girls on YouTube.
I suffered 20 years of stage fright. My love language became procrastination! (lol) Writers block of one form or another followed. I thought academia wasn’t for me and left to get my MRS Degree. After a 5 year adjunct with TED I ended up landing here at University at Albany.
What has helped me find my voice has been my art and my artistry, my exploration of being true to the ancestral voice inside me that loves to sing and dance. Be silly and to teach others to free their voice. The root of my trauma has been emotional manipulation, so my work is often about that from research to teaching. If you ask me what I do as a teacher, I tell people that I teach emerging adults to own their own greatness, and their intellectual, emotional and social fitness.
One of the areas you explore as an ethnomusicalogist and professor is music videos on youtube, specifically in the area of black girlhood and musical blackness. You cover a number of areas but one was of specific interest to me. Can you share a bit about what ‘supercuts‘ are and maybe elaborate on that as a feminist practice that has a genesis that has been largely overlooked historically, and why it matters? Also, do you see a larger meaning or influence of this style of editing specifically in our current, larger cultural and political context as a communications style / tool?
I have a featured Vlog on my YouTube channel about the history of ‘supercuts.’ Most people don’t know that the vidding community of girls and women, invented the idea of ‘supercuts’ something that has taken over video culture since 2007. Vidding is when amateur content creators remix clips from their favorite songs and television shows together into an emotional narrative. It’s an underground scene that’s over 40 years in the making. As frequently is the case, the contributions of the most marginalized communities gets co-opted or gentrified by mainstream entities for profit, and the real influencers are left behind. The vidding community was primarily white and Latina. I’ve tried in my collaborative research with undergrads to change that. I prioritize emotional and effective labor with my students, who are emerging adults. In academia we focus a lot on STEM and book knowledge but not on helping students learn to have greater empathy for themselves and others. When we do that, we have more empathy for black girls and brown girls and disabled girls and other marginalized girls whose lives are often not represented by headlines about the harms of social media that have been in the news the last few years, even to the point of leading to congressional hearings. The black girl is the most disrespected user in the precarious and unregulated spaces of online content creation for kids and youth.
The aesthetic found in the female vidding community are similar aesthetics to most communities, but particularly the African aesthetic found from remix culture to dub culture and music. I argue with my first book that these aesthetics come from black girls game songs from hand club, games cheers and double dutch jump rope play. It’s the musicianship of gaming that is the hidden obvious as we like to say as ethnographers.
You are also an ‘AI and Society’ Fellow at SUNY Albany. When we met, you had an interesting perspective on AI and how educators should consider approaching the tool with regards to student use…care to revisit that?
I found a new home thanks to Elizabeth Gray in the AI & Society Research Center at University at Albany. Most people on campus are pretty conservative about technology because our infrastructure really doesn’t help us explore new media and new emerging technologies. I recently spent two weeks writing a proposal for a Guggenheim fellowship in which I explore how the nonverbal sonic aspects of musical blackness cannot be read by AI’s large language models (LLM).
‘They tend to be text and visual based, but even when they do and code voice like Siri or Alexa, how do they translate in eyes and oops of African musical aesthetics?‘
I transcribed that last sentence by audio and you see what it produced. Let me transcribe that with human ingenuity: How does AI translate the aahs, the umms, the James Brown screams and field hollers, the Cardi B rolled kitten r’s or the moans from spirituals to jazz without a micro archive to develop systems of artificial intelligence consistent with ways of thinking, feeling, believing and behaving that are not from the term forms of knowledge associated with WEIRD nations (White, English Speaking, Industrialized, Rich Democracies).
I want to study with what Legacy Russell calls Glitch Feminism. The ghosts in the machine of artificial intelligence, the missing links, the faux pas that signal that you can’t read blackness. It begs the question: Does AI have any black and female friends? Like the old saying goes, ‘there’s truth in jest.’ Unless we have more ethnomusicologists interpreting non-western cultures in LLMs, more of us doing work with supercomputers like what’s available at the University at Albany, and having those systems made available to scholars like me – – a black women, brown women, people with disabilities, neurodivergents – the true revolution will be lost and left to only the most privileged in WEIRD Nations as we move into the age of post human AI intelligence. We are inhabiting the world that Octavia Butler imagined in ‘Parable of the Sower’. And I for one, will will do my best not to let that happen. I may be 63 years old and not considered somebody who is interested in new technology just because of my age. But my wisdom and ancestors who speak through me have so much more to offer than many of my students at a public university who have not been educated to trust their own thinking, take liberties and have compassion for people who are ‘not like us.’ (to riff off last summers Kendrick Lamar hit)
In 2018 you had a TED video called “How the Jump Rope Got Its Rhythm” that has a total of over 7M views with translations in 29 languages. While covering the history of jumping rope and its importance as a tool of young female identity you also discussed how that playground practice then moved on to influence popular culture, specifically with black artists. Care to share a bit about this? I was intrigued by the concept of ‘Kinetic Orality‘ as a tool for memory. Please elaborate!
Kinetic orality and aurality is our first technology, both musical and otherwise. Hearing is the first sensory cognitive organ to develop in the womb. Nonverbal communication is our first language, it’s why in my opinion you should teach kids sign language before they can speak. There’s a gene in our DNA that prevents us from being able to say certain things with our tongue until a certain age. It’s just part of human development. However, kids can start to speak before they learn English by using sign language. We communicate all kinds of emotional knowledge and effective information by eye contact, tone, voice, facial expressions, gesture, timing, body posture, intensity, and our reactions to other human beings around us. Neuroscientist Daniel Siegel says that this is how you build an integrated brain in a child or in an adult. How does AI do this without hormones, without all of those factors of an integrated brain so that it can reproduce knowledge that I’d identify as African or African-American in tone, feel, touch and other sensibilities? Not just literate and visual communication?
Kinetic orality lives through the embodied action and percussion in games like telephone that we all remember from childhood. Black girls game songs have that added dimension of rhythmic intricacy and contrast expressed in polyrhythms, complexity and touch. We share hormones that keep us alive through touch, through hugs, through smiles and through laughter. AI doesn’t know how to tell a good black joke is my bet. It doesn’t know how to give sass and clap back to boys and men who think they can turn you into a joke or a punch line, whether it’s the Charlie Kirk‘s or the Drake’s of the world. Whether it’s the bullies or the sexual predators.
Kinetic orality is a term invented by Cornell West from 1989. He called it, the passionate physicality and embodied communication we used to survive and dream of freedom. I call it a technology, our first. Socio-biologists believe that music is our first technology. It’s what let us to walk upright to be able to sing a lullaby to a child swaddled on your back while you’re foraging or hunting. It led to how we language beyond the present to tell stories about the past and the future. Musical tone speech became the languages we all speak. Sets of pops and hisses as neuropsychologist Lera Boroditsky says turns into thousands of different languages among a single human race sharing 99.8% of the same DNA.
Embodied scripts of epigenetic or ancestral memory as behavior becomes part of our learned ways of being musical blackness. The earliest formation of a black popular music culture learned by kids, taught by girls, happens at a very young age; girls are taste makers of Black popular culture but they receive no royalties for them because they are children, they are female and they aren’t literate yet.
Finally, you also a singer songwriter in the jazz genre. How often do you gig and where can we find some of your music?
Right now I’m writing a memoir which I call a vocal memoir due to the fact that it’s based around several micro stories regarding my teaching after receiving hate mail my first year in the profession back in 1997, pertaining to various dimensions of my song life. A spiritual accompanies a story about why isn’t there a chapter on love in an anthropology textbook. The first song I ever wrote about meeting my dad at age 40 is accompanied by a story about daddy’s and daughters in the black community and the way people talk about deadbeat dads and won’t forgive the human experience. It’s my one woman show called Education Liberation: A Vocal Memoir. The tag is, ‘I know why the caged bird won’t sing.’
I performed it at University at Albany twice. The last time was in 2022. I sit in at a jazz jam sessions when I can, but now that I have arrived at having tenure, I can do more of the things I love. I’ve been cultivating the idea of doing an Albany First Friday event where I sing, tell stories and read poetry in the cozy lounge at the Argus Hotel in downtown Albany…
You can find my CD on all major platforms from iTunes to Spotify. But if you want me to make a few coins, then buy it on CDBaby. I love doing small gigs, parties or celebrations and I’m also a voice over artist. People love the voice that I was born with. I did the last national campaign for Planned Parenthood before Roe v. Wade was overturned. In fact, it was my first voice over gig ever.