With Maia Chao, Erik DeLuca, Matt Evans, Amirtha Kidambi, and Daniel Midgley

How do we express the act of listening through language? Often, it’s through small, easily overlooked sounds—“mm-hmm,” “yeah,” “right,” “I see.” In linguistics, these backchannels, or response tokens, are known as phatic expressions: they don’t carry semantic meaning, but serve as vital relational tools. This live lecture-performance will animate theories of discourse analysis, performed by a new music ensemble specializing in improvisation and collective composition. Audience members will consider questions like: How might we find poetry in the everyday utterance? This performance is an invitation to reflect on how power circulates in conversation, and how the subtlest inflections—an audible exhale, a repetition, a pause—might reveal the ways meaning is made and unmade.