When Bells Spoke: A Conversation with Musicologist Dr. Alex Fisher
The Blue Hour: Sackbuts, Soundscapes, Bells, and Reformation Germany
In this conversation, I speak with Professor Alex Fisher about bells, early music, soundscapes, weather, ritual, and the religious worlds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany.
CiTR 101.9 FM / The Blue Hour Recorded live on June 30, 2026
Listen to the interview on CiTR
The Blue Hour, hosted by Farha Guerrero, airs live every Tuesday at 2 p.m. on CiTR 101.9 FM in Vancouver and at citr.ca.
Alex Fisher is Professor in the UBC School of Music, where he coordinates Early Music. He is both a distinguished musicologist and a performing musician. Trained as a trombonist, he later specialized in the Renaissance sackbut and has performed with leading early music ensembles. He is also a co-founder of Cappella Borealis.
As a scholar, Professor Fisher studies the musical, religious, and cultural worlds of early modern Germany, with particular interests in soundscapes, ritual, and the relationship between music and religious identity during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. His work has appeared in leading journals, including the Journal of Musicology, Early Music History, and the Sixteenth Century Journal. His books include Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg and Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria.
Our conversation moves through the sound worlds of early modern Europe, from the deep resonance of church bells to the civic and religious meanings carried by sound. We talk about the sackbut, the Renaissance ancestor of the modern trombone, and the ways in which early music opens a door into another way of hearing the past.
We focus especially on two of Professor Fisher’s more recent publications: his chapter “Bells” in Information: A Historical Companion, published by Princeton University Press in 2021, and his article “Hearing the Trumpets of the Church Militant: Weather Bells and Supernatural Audition in Post-Reformation Germany,” published in the Sixteenth Century Journal in 2022.
Together, these works invite us to think about bells not simply as musical instruments, but as technologies of communication, symbols of civic and religious life, and, for many centuries, voices believed to reach both human and supernatural listeners.
Bells called people to prayer, marked death, gathered communities, warned of danger, and even rang out against storms. They belonged at once to the sacred and the secular, to ritual and daily life, to the human world and to the imagined supernatural one.
In speaking with Professor Fisher, I was struck by how vividly bells still speak across time. To hear them historically is to enter a world in which sound was not background, but message, memory, warning, devotion, and presence.
Transcript
Farha: Alex, welcome to The Blue Hour.
Alex: Thank you very much. Happy to be here.
Farha: I would like to talk first about you, the musician. You first encountered this very old instrument called the sackbut while studying, I believe, maybe in your graduate studies. Is that right?
Alex: My undergraduate.
Farha: Undergraduate studies, okay. Was that Northwestern?
Alex: Northwestern University, correct.
Farha: For listeners who may have never heard of such an instrument, could you tell us about this early form of what became the modern trombone? But this instrument goes back centuries.
Alex: The sackbut is an instrument which resembles the modern trombone. There are some small differences, and actually the trombone is perhaps the one instrument that has changed the least, I would say, in the last 600 years. A Renaissance sackbut also has a slide, it also has a bell, it also has a mouthpiece, and it is played in a similar fashion. But the construction is a little bit different, and it has quite a different sound from a modern trombone.
Modern trombones were designed to fill up gigantic 19th- and 20th-century concert halls, whereas the Renaissance and Baroque versions of the trombone were really designed as chamber music instruments. They were designed to blend with singers, blend with other instruments, and they were especially prized for church music. The sound of the early instrument is much more intimate, much more delicate, but it is actually very versatile, and it allows us to play with all kinds of different instruments and voices as we try to recreate that sound world from 400 or 500 years ago.
Farha: The Sackbut brought me back to Venice, the Venice from a few hundred years ago. There were names like Andrea Gabrieli and Giovanni Gabrieli, who would have been using these instruments then at places like St. Mark’s Cathedral, but also Monteverdi, this extraordinary early composer of opera.
I spoke with your colleague a couple of weeks ago, Claudio Vellutini, and we talked about Monteverdi. He even used the sackbut in his Vespas, as they called them, these very early pieces of music. What is interesting is that this is an instrument that fuses well with the human voice. Do you feel that?
Alex: I absolutely do feel that, to the point where if I am playing a modern trombone, I think it is extremely difficult to blend with others. The instrument just wants to be loud. Whereas with the Renaissance instrument, it really does play at a volume level that is commensurate with the human voice and with the violin. It really is no surprise that composers like Andrea Gabrieli, Giovanni Gabrieli, and Claudio Monteverdi would have found the sackbut a very natural choice to add to their ensembles.
Alex: I might just add quickly that your listeners might be interested in the fact that at the end of July, Early Music Vancouver will be producing the first major opera in the operatic repertory, Monteverdi’s Orfeo of 1607, and my colleagues and I are very thrilled to be part of that production at the Chan Centre.
Farha: That is amazing. Claudio, your colleague, not Claudio Monteverdi, did mention that, and I am going to get tickets because that looks incredible.
But let’s bring us to what you co-founded, Cappella Borealis, which is an ensemble. I do not remember how long you have been together as musicians, but tell us about that and the vision behind it, and what you have been doing all these years with bringing these instruments to life and breathing life into many things that we think of as something of the past, but that are actually still part of our lives.
Alex: I have been playing the Renaissance sackbut since I was an undergraduate, on and off, and I have always kept an eye out here at UBC and here in Vancouver for talented musicians who might be interested in picking up this instrument and learning it. I discovered that there were a couple of people who had actually played the instrument before. Roughly 11 or 12 years ago, I started putting out some feelers to some very talented trombone players in the community to find out if they had played sackbut before, if they were willing to learn it, and if they were willing to play it.
We have played together as a quartet, myself, Ellen Marple, Jeremy Berkman, and Nathan Wilkes, for about the last dozen years. We have been really excited to collaborate with a number of different organizations for different productions of music from the 16th and 17th centuries. My principal job is as a historian, an academic, but it is always thrilling to me to keep one of my feet in the performance world. I am extremely grateful to my colleagues in Cappella Borealis that they have really been able to make that happen for me and for us as a collective. I hope we are able to add a distinctive ensemble sound to the local musical scene. So far, it is going really well.
Farha: Now I regret I did not ask you to bring the sackbut into the studio, because it would be nice to hear you play.
I want to move on, but I am still very intrigued by this instrument. The name has many forms, if I am not mistaken. Sackbut is one of them, but the origins, we believe, have a French origin, and there is this push-and-pull meaning embedded in the name, if I am right. Could you describe the instrument, how it works, the mouthpiece, which is a little bit different from the modern trombone, the materials, and also the bell, which I really like, because of course the bell is a big part and will be a great segue to when we start talking about bells in a different sense.
Alex: “Sac” literally means a push-pull, and that word does come out of the French. There are English adaptations of that term, like sagbutt and shagbutt, all kinds of very interesting and slightly strange terms. In other languages, they have just kept the word for trombone for the last 500 years. Posaune in German denotes both a modern trombone as well as a Renaissance instrument. La trombone in French, literally means a paper clip. In a lot of ways, a sackbut looks like a big paper clip.
You make the sound by buzzing your lips through a metal mouthpiece. The sound goes into the instrument, and you change the length of the instrument, and therefore the pitch, by moving the slide in and out. The instrument does culminate in something that we call a bell, but it is a bell that is not nearly as large as a modern trombone. That is because the instrument was not designed to project its sound as violently as the modern trombone. It is an instrument that is very well suited to its historical context.
Farha: As you said, your research definitely goes beyond the music side, but there is this word, soundscapes, which we were talking about before we went on air, and I would love you to ground us in it. It is music history that comes into this sound history, and then soundscapes, which has been coined, interestingly, as you were saying, that has some history here in Vancouver.
Alex: The term soundscape was really popularized by a composer with deep roots in the Lower Mainland, R. Murray Schafer, who was a composer and theorist. Murray Schafer really began to popularize the term soundscape. He started to use it to describe his own compositions starting in the late 1960s. Some of these compositions were works that combined artificial sounds with the sounds of the natural environment. In a way, some of these compositions were more like happenings rather than pieces of music that you would write down in a score and accurately reproduce ad infinitum.
He really developed this term soundscape to describe the total sound environment that we are surrounded in and that we perceive on a day-to-day basis. This soundscape can include musical sounds, but it can also include an infinite variety of natural sounds, animal sounds, and artificial sounds that are not necessarily considered to be musical sounds. He really wanted us to tune our ears to this environment and think critically about the kinds of sounds we want in our environment and other kinds of sounds that he felt were less welcome.
So, he was quite prejudiced in many ways against many industrial sounds that he felt were sort of polluting our soundscape and de-tuning our ears to the richer variety of natural sounds that are around us. His project in many ways was a critical project, a cultural project. For me as a historian, I am really trying to think not about the industrial sound world, but about lost sound worlds that may have existed 400 and 500 years ago.
I got into this because I have always been particularly interested in religious history, in the ways that different religious communities related to each other. Sometimes the most dramatic and effective way that a community can define itself is through the medium of sound: through the medium of singing, the medium of speech, the medium of bells, and sometimes other kinds of sounds like the firing of cannon or muskets, the beating of drums, or the playing of pipes.
I would really say that this has been the core of my academic work in recent years: trying to think about the ways that sound was a medium of social distinction and religious distinction, but also something that bridges communities potentially.
Because you can close your eyes, but you cannot close your ears.
Therefore, different religious communities in early modern Europe were hearing the sounds of others and engaging with those sounds, sometimes in a positive way and sometimes in a negative way.
Farha: This is very interesting. I like what you said about the search for lost sounds.
I mentioned to you earlier, before we came on air, that I had grown up on this campus and I remember the sound/song of the foghorn. It is a childhood memory that I will always associate with my childhood. It was a very distinctive sound, and on a very foggy day, we would hear it.
And now, fast forward, I have a second life in a place in Italy that is still very medieval and Roman. It is a town in northern Italy in the Alps called Aosta, and I wake up every day to the sound of church bells. And they ring all day as well. They are signatures of time. If I did not have a watch, I could certainly know what time of day it was.
And then, if I bike high enough in the Alps and get into alpine country, I am going to hear other sounds, and those are cowbells that reverberate through the mountain landscape.
So tell, us about this idea of a 'lost sound’ that still continues. How do you feel about that?
Alex: It is a fascinating question because it gets into the issue of industrialization to some degree. We have lots of different ways of telling the time of day now that do not require church bells. We all have wristwatches and iPhones. We can get time signals from the radio, from all kinds of mechanical clocks. The need, I think, for bells in the modern day is a different one. I feel strongly that there is a big element of nostalgia involved.
If you travel to Europe, you are perceiving a soundscape that is partly lost in certain ways, and we do not have the ears or the brains anymore to quite capture all of the different distinctions of different kinds of bell sounds.
When I go to Europe to do my research, I am surrounded in a wash, an atmosphere of bell sounds every single day, but I simply am not trained or tuned to all of the different possible meanings.
If we go back before the industrial age, I think there is a very good case to be made that the sounds of bells structured both time and space for premodern populations. They didn’t just tell the clock time, but they also gave information about what Murray Schafer actually called qualitative time instead of quantitative time.
Qualitative time refers to the cycle of the church, the liturgical calendar, the different seasons of the religious year. It tells you when the sun is coming up. It tells you when the sun is going down. It is carefully tied to the observations of astronomy.
Bells tell you when the market is opening. They tell you when the market is closing.
Bells were rung to warn people about imminent disasters and tribulations: the approach of enemies, or fire that had broken out in the city, which would be signalled by frantic bell sounds coming from the towers.
Bells, in fact, were also rung to dispel the clouds that create thunderstorms. Before the age of the lightning rod, before we knew the mechanisms by which thunder was produced, thunderstorms were often considered to be a sign of divine wrath, of God’s disapproval for a sinful population. By ringing the church bells, bells compelled people to pray, to ask for God’s mercy to avert these oncoming disasters.
And depending on what religion or faith you belonged to, bells might compel prayer. But for Catholic populations in particular, they actually thought that the sound of the bell could drive the clouds away and could drive away the demons and witches that were in the clouds and were thought to cause these thunderstorms.
You can see that bells in the premodern era had such a rich variety of functions, that are kind of lost to us today because our entire environment has changed.
Farha: I was really surprised to find a publication of yours in the book Information: A Historical Companion, because the book is really about how human beings have made, transmitted, organized, trusted, and received information across time.
You have a chapter called “Bells,” and bells are understood, of course, as a medium that was not only sending public information through sound, but also functioning as a kind of premodern communication technology.
What I was also quite intrigued by was that this was not just religious. Bells were also very much part of the non-religious world, whether they were rung to bring people to the square to pay their taxes, or rung for death so that people knew about a death in the community. So the civic side of bells as a form of communication was really interesting to me.
The secular and religious seem to overlap. As you say, if we were trained to know, and if we could go back in time and learn how to hear them, we would know whether the bells were calling people to church to pray, or calling them to some kind of civic duty.
Alex: I think it was Schafer again who used this terminology with reference to bells, that bells have both a centripetal function as well as a centrifugal function. Bells were rung to call people together. They called people to church services. They compelled people to pray. In the case of more earthly troubles like fires, or floods, or thunderstorms, or the approach of enemies, they could call, for example, the local militia together to defend the city.
But they also have this centrifugal function of driving away evil, of driving away clouds, of driving away evil spirits, of driving away witches. That is something that has always been fascinating to me, this dual function of bells.
In both cases, bells are also very much tied up with notions of power and notions of authority. In many places in premodern Europe, the most powerful institution was the church. The church had a monopoly over the highest towers in the city in which bells were hung. Bells were extremely expensive to produce and procure. In some cities that had strong civic governments, there would be bells owned by the city itself and used for various secular functions.
Conversely, people who were unauthorized to ring the bells, if somehow they managed to break into the church tower and ring the bells of their own volition, that was considered a signal of rebellion, of revolt, because you have common people appropriating to themselves one of the most potent symbols of sonic authority in the city, which is the bell.
Farha: Then you touch on something that was really interesting. It resembles baptism, this consecration ritual. A priest could be washing the bell with salt and oil, chanting prayers, and anointing it. That makes the bell now, an object of some sacredness, it seems.
Alex: It is one of the most fascinating and, in fact, controversial elements of the history of bells. It has been established that the ringing of metal was considered to have magical or supernatural power going back to the ancient world.
When bells were widely introduced into Western Christianity from the sixth century, the seventh century onward, I think they retained some elements of that philosophy.
You are right, there was a consecration ritual that was developed for an ordained priest to bless a newly cast bell. And by conducting this liturgy, by washing the bell in holy water, by anointing it in oil, by reciting the proper liturgical texts, it actually granted the bell a kind of sacral power that the bronze alone did not have.
Not only that, when they cast bells in the Middle Ages and in Catholic Europe of the Renaissance, they would often add inscriptions to the bell that actually speak directly to its power, not just to call people together for prayer, but also to drive away all manner of tribulations. I say it was controversial because there was actually a lot of debate in premodern Europe about where does the power of the bell actually resides. Does it reside in the sound that it makes?
In other words, are the demons and witches flying through the air? Are they actually hearing the sounds of this bell and desisting from their evil plots against human beings? So, is it the sound, or is it that act of consecration that gives the bell a kind of sacral quality? Does God hear the bell when it is rung? Does it make a difference if the bell has been consecrated or not consecrated?
It gets into a very complicated history after the Protestant Reformation, where the Protestants really discounted the power of consecrated objects, things like bells, amulets, crosses, and candles. Protestants like Martin Luther and his successors would say, no, it has nothing to do with the actual sound of the bell, much less its consecration by the clergy. But if the sound of the bell compels people to pray, then that is the one and only possible use of this instrument. We have this debate that unfolds through the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
Farha: This is really spelled out in “Hearing the Trumpets of the Church Militant: Weather Bells and Supernatural Audition in Post-Reformation Germany,” this recent article of yours. What is interesting, too, is that even despite the objections to the bells on the different sides, and you mentioned Luther, the bells continue to ring. That is interesting, that the bells do not really stop. Am I right on that?
Alex: That is absolutely true. In fact, the Lutherans do continue to ring their bells, but the pastors and theologians are constantly trying to remind their parishioners that it is not about the sound, it is about the prayer.
Even Protestants had a notion of supernatural beings like demons and witches. That was not only a Catholic belief. Even Luther believed that there were demons in the air that were out there to tempt us away from the right path.
Luther and his successors acknowledged that bell ringing was still useful. It was still something that we can do, but it has to be understood in the right manner and the right context. If it is something that makes people pray, then that is what they are really after. They are trying to get beyond what they would have regarded as a superstitious notion of the sound of a bell and trying to get closer to what the bell makes people do. That is what God is hearing. He is not hearing the sound of the bell, but he is hearing the prayers that are compelled by that sound.
Now, were the Lutherans successful in convincing a broader population that bells have no magical effects? No, they were not successful in that. We know this because they are constantly having to repeat this warning, this admonition, in their sermons, that you have to ignore the sound and focus on the prayer.
This is an absolutely tenacious kind of listening practice that goes back many, many centuries, and it would take much more than a handful of Lutheran theologians to eliminate that belief.
Farha: It is important when you say it goes back many centuries. The first traces of bells as we know them, I guess historians can go back to Southeast Asia, maybe 3000 BCE, and then they would have spread to places like India and China and the Near East, and eventually the Mediterranean. There are examples as well in Africa and pre-Columbian Americas.
I asked you if you had a bell, and you had one, although you do not really know too much about the bell, because it was a gift from a student. Maybe it’s time for you to ring it.
Alex: Okay. I will preface this by saying this is just a small handbell, and I know really nothing about its origins, but it very well might resemble an early bell that might have been used in the Middle Ages to call people to prayer or services.
[Bell rung]
Farha: You have said that bells can be as small as well under a centimetre, and then you mentioned one in the Kremlin in Moscow that is 6.6 metres in diameter, weighing some 200,000 kilograms. So bells have all sizes. They have, as you have said, many purposes and many meanings across time and space, and across cultures.
I was also trying to think about what the modern bell is. I asked my son, who is almost at the end of high school, what the bell sounds like, because that is a school bell I remember growing up with. My husband, who is from Argentina, maybe didn’t have the modern bell that I grew up with, but he actually has memories of a real bell, of the administration coming out and ringing a real bell when recess or lunch was over.
So what do you think of, when you think of the modern bell, is there still such a thing? Do you think our modern soundscapes have adapted to something that is similar?
Why do you think your chapter belonged in that book, a study that had such a cross-section of many layers of ideas of how information and communication have been dispersed over time.
Alex: I think the justification for a chapter on bells rests principally on the idea that in an age before widespread literacy, and particularly in cities where sight-lines were often restricted and streets were very narrow, you could often only capture information with your eyes to the end of the next street or so. It was very difficult to visually apprehend the city from a subject position.
What that means is that sonic information, and maybe bells are the most profound, widespread, and detailed mode of sonic information that was available to premodern populations. That is why I think bells had a lot to do with structuring people’s sense not only of time, because they certainly relied on bells to understand what the time of day was, and what the liturgical season was, but they also needed bells for a much wider variety of functions.
You had night watchmen going through the city ringing bells at intervals, which was actually not a disturbing sound, but a reassuring sound in many cities, especially before the advent of electric lighting.
Bells also taught people how to understand the space they lived in. A bell that hung in a parish church, for example, the boundary of the parish was not necessarily a fixed visual geographical boundary, but was often understood as the radius at which you could hear its sound from the tower. That distance could actually change depending on wind and weather and humidity.
And so, bells were actually structuring sonic space. You might even say they produced the space of the premodern parish church, because I think it was understood as much sonically as it was visually. I would argue, that it is the profound element of sonic information that really justifies the presence of that chapter.
Thinking of bells today, things have certainly changed, and it really depends on your own position. In many European cities, there are churches that still have distinctive and differentiated cycles of bell ringing.
There is a particular bell to mark the beginning of a church service. In Catholic churches, there is a particular bell that is rung when the priest blesses the Eucharist, the bread and the wine, mystically transforming them into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. That moment is often marked by a bell sound.
You can have all kinds of different combinations of bells to mark different kinds of liturgical occasions and festal occasions. Some of that premodern practice still persists.
If we walk up into the Italian Alps, we can still hear some of the same sounds of herds of animals with bells that we would have heard hundreds of years ago. It is just that after industrialization, our lifestyles have changed to the extent that we have partly lost that understanding of the different functions of different bells.
Four or five hundred years ago, people could recognize the specific timbre of a bell, the specific location of it, and what kind of information it was trying to convey.
This is what Murray Schafer would have called a hi-fi soundscape, as opposed to a lo-fi soundscape. In a hi-fi soundscape, we have this rich, highly differentiated sound environment around us that we come to understand. He would describe the modern industrial soundscape as a lo-fi soundscape, where there is often, in the background, always some kind of mechanical electrical humming that is constantly accompanying us and masking the potential richness of the natural world around us.
That is definitely a profound change.
Farha: As a writer, the book For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway, after reading your work, Alex, that title has rendered new meanings for me. We do not need to go into a discussion about that, but it interests me now why Hemingway chose that title, but especially because of bells and death and how they marked death or the approach of death.
Something you say was interesting, that the differences of the bells ringing, their duration and intensity, could convey differences in class, gender, or age of the deceased. That is very interesting too, because now we are getting into something deeper.
We are not just hearing different soundscapes and recognizing them, but also hearing how a person who dies is marked by the bells that ring. That is fascinating.
Alex: Like I said before, bells are a profound expression of power, of status. They are highly valuable objects. They are inevitably carefully controlled by authorities. You are absolutely right that during funeral processions, the intensity and length of bell ringing was often coordinated with social status. If a really illustrious prince or princess passed away, in some premodern European cities you might hear bell ringing lasting an entire day marking that death, whereas you would have much more modest sounds for people of more modest means.
What is worth saying is that no matter how poor or marginalized the person, there was an expectation that you would hear the sound of the bell.
In fact, it was very controversial in places in central Europe that were riven by religious conflict. If, for example, the Catholics took over a Protestant town, they would deny Protestants the privilege of ringing bells for their funerals.
Farha: It almost becomes political.
Alex: It absolutely becomes political, and it generates a massive amount of protest that is still recorded in archival documents today that you can go back and read. Bell sounds were really considered to be a central part of not just secular life, but religious life. For many, they really did embody this kind of sacral power to both bring people together and to drive away evil.
Farha:. You did send me another article, and I do want to give you a little bit of space for that, because it is very recent. Could you tell us a little bit about that? It is a continuation of your soundscape studies, certainly, but a little bit different.
Alex: This is the one about the children and the processions?
Farha: Yes
Alex: I just had an article published that has to do with the Jesuits, this new order of Catholic priests that emerged in the 16th century, and the Jesuits’ use of singing in catechism instruction, especially for children. I will not go too deep into it, but I think it is important to say that in an age of religious conflict, both sides of that conflict, both the Catholics as well as the Protestants, looked at children as the key for making longstanding religious change that would persist.
The Lutherans developed not just catechism, but also simple songs for children to sing to instruct them in the basic articles of the faith and to tell them how they themselves, as Lutheran children, were different. They had different beliefs than the Catholics. The Jesuits picked up on this as well. Some of my current research really does have to do with the ways in which Catholic Jesuits were trying to reclaim Protestant territory in cities in Germany by mobilizing children, by putting them on display in public, by making them march around and process, and by making them sing songs.
They recognized, just as Luther recognized, that by setting words to music, you can memorize them much more easily than without. They recognized that music was a key vehicle for actually learning the faith and for instilling these principles. Like I mentioned earlier, music can be used both to bring people together and also to divide.
And so it is both of those functions are really fascinating to me in a context of social difference and religious difference.
Farha: Finally, where are you at with your future research? What do you want to do, or what are you working on? You have published a lot.
Alex: The books I have written previously are really deep dives into very particular cities and places. I am currently working on a book project about the soundscapes of German Catholicism in an age of religious conflict. This is meant to be geographically broad. I have been visiting archives and libraries all over Austria and Germany, and even Italy, looking for original archival documents as well as music that hopefully will let me make a bigger argument about the ways in which German Catholics asserted themselves through the medium of sound.
That will include elaborate part music, including sackbuts and things like that, but also simple songs like hymns.
It will include bell ringing. It will include military drumming and trumpeting, as well as gunfire and cannon fire.
There is a lot of work with public rituals that were meant to deepen the identity of Catholics, to make them more convinced of the correctness of their belief, but also, frankly, sometimes to provoke and terrify Protestants at the same time. I am hoping that book will be completed, fingers crossed, in the next two to three years.
Farha: Thank you, Alex. I really enjoyed our conversation. I wish you happy travels, because it sounds like you are on the move, finding more archival sources for your research.
Alex: Yes, I am. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed the conversation.
For readers interested in Alex Fisher’s work and the ideas discussed in this conversation:
Information: A Historical Companion — Princeton University Press