The Good Robot Podcast: featuring Pedro Oliveira

Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry Mackereth, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode Eleanor and Kerry talk to Pedro Oliveira, a researcher and sound artist based at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Pedro does amazing work investigating border control technologies that listen to asylum seekers and claim to be able to discern where they came from from the way they speak. In this episode we discuss why these kinds of technologies rely on the assumption that there is an authentic way that a migrant from a particular place should sound. Our quest to unravel vocal authenticity takes us through frequency, timbre, and 1960s synthesisers from East Berlin.