CTM 2014 Sound, Gender, Technology – Where to with Cyberfeminism

Welcome, thanks for coming everybody. This is the final day of the discourse program, so glad that so many of you made it. First I'm going to give you a bit of an overview of the proceedings today, a few introductory remarks about the panel, the motivation for the panel and within the context of discontinuity. Then we'll have some discussion within the panel with our guests and then the short break and the entire Rogers lecture. So this year's festival theme, as you probably know, is discontinuity. And one of the main impetuses behind this idea was retracing or uncovering and unearthing forgotten and neglected

histories or stories within experimental and electronic music. So over the past few days here, We've had several pioneers talking about their work and lectures on different movements from Soviet Union, which is linked in with the Renoise exhibition downstairs. Mexico, Finland with the work of Erki Kuryanomi, Sweden with the work of the EMS Stockholm studio, Holland and Central and Eastern Europe. So this focus has been aimed at kind of diversifying the dominant narratives within experimental music, which is often very Eurocentric and Anglo-American centric.

So it's been really fascinating to give these other lesser known stories and tendencies a bit of an airing. And the aim of today's panel is to look at yet another neglected dimension. So today is about gender, sound and technology. So in the past year, the topic of women and electronic music has been widely discussed. And most of this discussion has quite rightly been focused on the lack of women in electronic music. In the middle of last year, 2013, the female pressure statistics came out, which kind of lay to bear the situation in numbers. I'll just quote a few of them Worldwide average of festivals

not including women festivals 8.2% female artists in the women only acts and a further 7.3% mixed acts CTM itself had 9.9% female artists and a total of 15.5% women only mixed and transgender acts So I'm really pleased that Susanna can make it as the founder of Female Pressure, which she founded in 1998, doing really wonderful work, creating a platform on this intersection between music and gender politics. So thank you, Susanna. I'd like to also mention the motivations

for bringing this panel together. there was a symposium in London at the Tate Modern called Her Noise and that was a 10-year celebration of the Her Noise project founded by Anna Hilda Nisset and Lina Dvorovich and one of the interesting things that came out these recordings can be listened to online and really really great really interesting talks and one of the things that stuck with me was a comment so they started this project in 2001 or 2002 and they applied to several several venues trying to get them interested in putting on this event. And she said something like, the terms feminism and sound themselves were so unpopular that the combination of the two was lethal. And I found this quite fitting.

And I think now, 2014, things are a bit better. I think people are a bit more open for these terms. But yeah, this kind of stuck to me. So a bit of a historical reflection too. So taking these as our starting points, discontinuity on the one hand and the question of gender politics within music. Today's panel and keynote lecture are hoping to open up this other gender dimension in a way that often gets overlooked. So this panel is aimed at looking at the current situation on a more abstract level, not just on the level of female representation in electronic music but on the level of the gender discourse. So the starting point of the panel is not not to say, okay, there are men and there are women, and how can we make them more equally represented, say, in electronic music?

But rather the question is, how do we become men and women, and how do music and technology, what sort of role do they play in creating a gendered subject? This is kind of aim of the panel. so maybe it sounds a bit abstract to jump in and start talking about gendered subjects but I thought one way of exemplifying it is if you open a magazine and look at the way in which music technology devices are marketed and it's quite clearly geared towards the male consumer it kind of gives us an occasion to look at sex and gender as constructs as socially and physically constructed and not as biologically given The setting of the panel is one that welcomes this more abstract viewpoint and a critique

of the everyday, critique of everyday assumptions and norms. And as you probably noticed, the topic of the day is also cyber feminism and the reason for bringing this in was cyber feminism which has not been that present in the past five, five, ten years maybe, but it was very present 15 to 20 years ago, as just a kind of point of departure where the topics of women in technology were really discussed and debated. So just to have a kind of historical reference point for the discussion today. So I would like to introduce our four panel guests, and then we'll proceed with the presentations. First we have Fender Schrader.

Fender is a musician, performance artist, light designer and media engineer. Since 1994, he and she has worked as a live sound engineer in various international venues, using different electronic media such as sound, light and video in the fields of performance art and live art, music and sound. His, her practice is performance based and situation led, exploring the boundaries of cultural norms and media technological developments from a transgender perspective. Welcome. Next we have Sadie Plant. Sadie is an author and philosopher. She has taught in the areas of philosophy and cultural studies at Birmingham University,

Warwick University and Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. Her work often deals with the cultural implications of technological change and she is the author of The Most Radical Gesture, Zeros and Ones, Digital Women and the New Techniculture, and Writings on Drugs. She has also recently translated Nikolai and Wenzel's Labyrinths. Next we have Marie Thompson. Marie is a writer and researcher based in Nottingham, UK. She is primarily interested in the affective and materialist dimensions of sound and music. She is the co-editor of the book Sound Music Affect Theorizing Sonic Experience, which came out on Bloomsbury last year. And she recently completed her PhD thesis Beyond Unwanted Sound, Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism at Newcastle University.

And she has published On the Relationship Between Noise and Notions of Femininity. Marie is also active as a musician and sound maker, playing solo under the name Tragic Cabaret and in the band Beauty Pageant. And last but not least, we have Susanna Kirchmeyer, as I also mentioned, also known as Electric Indigo, DJ, composer and musician. As I mentioned before, in 1998 she founded Female Pressure, an international network for female artists in the realms of electronic music and club culture, which now has approximately 1,400 members in 59 countries. And in the past few she has won several awards in the fields of electronic music, computer music and composition.

So I'll hand it over to you, Sadie. Thank you very much, Annie. I would just like to bring to begin the session a few thoughts about music and cybernetics and the relationships between them. And to thank Annie very much for putting this whole panel together and for encouraging me to think about these issues in relation to music, which I must admit I have rarely done, really. I've always been rather wary, really, about writing and speaking about music. I think because music seems kind of such a special category to me, I think there's always a danger of really to write about something then there is a danger of producing

a very kind of secondary discourse and I've always been rather hesitant to do that but still it's been nice to be challenged to deal with these issues and music I think has always seemed to me to have a very privileged role or a potentially very privileged role in cultural history William Burroughs said that painting was always 50 years ahead of writing and I've always thought music must be at least 50 years ahead of both of them. It seems to me it has the potential to do so much that other art forms can only dream of and speculate about, and not least the fact that it is a fundamentally or has a fundamental tendency to be a non-representational form of art.

Now, speaking to Marie last night, I realised that in terms of musicology, this is all very contentious. and so it may not be quite as straightforward as I would like to think to say that but nevertheless there is in my mind an immediacy a directness about music and not least a kind of bodily effect which I know also Marie will be talking about which music can induce which seems to me to be quite unique and therein I feel lies a great deal of its philosophical and indeed its feminist potential. Although, of course, we know that music is also a very conservative field, there's a great tendency to intellectualize it and to keep bringing it back to kind of a visual,

a visually dominant culture. I think that's something that's always kind of troubled me a bit about music, really. From the kind of, you know, classical concerts right through to much more radical kinds of performance we're still very much living in a world where music is visually performed even to see somebody performing on the laptop in a club you know to go and kind of dutifully watch what they're doing has if I'm frank it always seemed rather strange to me you know and it's something I think is very interesting to sort of question and I often wondered how much there is a kind of tendency to overcompensate for this in the whole field of music, right through from pop culture to classical culture to experimental music, with so much paraphernalia,

you know, the teenager who loves to have the posters in the bedroom to collect the records, the record sleeves, all of these kind of desires to have something to hold on to, whereas of course we all know that the beauty of music is that it passes, it's transient, it's somehow ungraspable, ineffable. That's what seems to me is really special about it. But still, in the English language at least, we still go to see a band. You very rarely even speak about going to listen to a band. We go and see a band. And of course, all of that did begin to change in the 1990s, which was when I did first start writing about the sort of impact of what were then new technologies in all sorts of different cultural areas, certainly in the kind of club culture of the 1990s,

there was a shift towards the music, really, towards the immersive potential of the music. And with the whole rise of a kind of DJ culture, the notion of performance did change, the gap between the performer and the audience did break down. And it began to become much more of a kind of immersive experience in which the performance and audiences were far more kind of interactive. And that would be perhaps a very, you know, perhaps that's a beginning of a way to think about what a cybernetic kind of take on music can be. Because it moved, that was a move away from a kind of hierarchical linear structure towards something much more akin to a kind of feedback loop, If you think about the kind of DJ playing the music, seeing the effect on the dance floor, that then feeding back into the music that's played and so on.

And you can, you know, on a good night, you have this kind of sense that something takes off. Something starts to happen on its own, of which the DJ, the audience and the music and all of the elements are merely kind of part players. But what's happening is the network or the system as a whole. even as it's most basic and kind of pre-technological I think music's always obviously been a very technical way of operating it's always a matter of engineering sound even if you think of just simply playing an instrument even a very basic instrument is quite a precision technical object really so there is a kind of very long-standing technical side to music

and it seems to me that musicians also perhaps often unconsciously but have always at least had the potential to think of themselves as parts of a process of sound generation or of music making they're already kind of at home with the notion of themselves being instrumental in the production of sound and not necessarily the the thing really making it happen in this in a in a direct way. So even as it's least technological, it seems to me that there is a sense in which one, as a musician or as a performer, can feel kind of part of a bigger picture. There is a sense in which music's always been a kind of matter of getting circuits running and letting them,

getting them going and letting them run. So in that sense, it's no surprise that cybernetics as a kind of discipline emerging in the 1940s found probably its first kind of artistic creative home in the realm of sound and music and as of course has been talked about at this festival and shown in exhibitions many of the great pioneers of early electronic music were very interested in cybernetics and including some of the really big names such as obviously Brian Eno, John Cage, and so on. As a kind of way of thinking, cybernetics was developed in the 1940s and really came to prominence as a term with the publication of a book in 1948

by Norbert Wiener with the same name, cybernetics. And it was really developed as a way of thinking about how systems work and the kinds of activities, systemic activities, that are common to humans, animals, machines, anything which is kind of happening and not simply inert. so it was really a new way of thinking about systems to emphasize their own autonomy their own internal logic rather than looking at structures having some kind of external control feedback was really the kind of mainstay and of course this is a very old idea it predates the discussion about cybernetics in fact it's in the realm of sound and music that feedback did first

come to be thought about in terms of amplification. And when amplification was talked about in terms of feedback, then it was really explored as a question of positive feedback, that you would try to build a sound to boost or excite or, of course, amplify effects. But when cybernetics was first developed in the 1940s in a kind of military wartime context by Norbert Wiener, The point was very much not to have excitable circuits. It was very much about creating negative feedback and to keep things running in a kind of conservative way to establish some kind of homeostasis or equilibrium. You have a nice, smooth, stable system.

There is output. The output feeds in again, and it just keeps turning around nicely. and there is compensation possibilities built into the circuit to ensure that it does just keep going in a homeostatic form. Now, of course, in a central heating system, let's say, or a steam engine, obviously this is a very good thing because it keeps your apartment at a stable temperature, for example. But in other contexts, it doesn't take much to realise that too much equilibrium just leads to too much stasis. Then you have too much stability. And, of course, while a very simple loop may be able to keep itself constant, it doesn't take much complication to make it inevitable

and we perhaps would want to say even desirable, that there is some element of disturbance, some discontinuity to reference the title of the whole event, some kind of error, some kind of shift, something unexpected, which can send what started off as a kind of negative feedback loop into a spiral of excitable activity. Everything that was committed to maintaining the system suddenly turns around and starts to destabilize it. Norbert Wiener called these closed reverberating loops, and the classic example would be exactly this kind of feedback, guitar feedback kind of idea, a loop which starts to sing itself and produces its own kind of noise.

But all of this only applies to closed circuits, and closed circuits are in a way a kind of ideal case. It's very difficult to imagine what a truly closed circuit would mean. Even a system in an apartment, a central heating system, obviously it's not an entirely closed system. There may, for example, be a power surge, let's say, from outside, the loop, which would produce some unexpected activity. So no loop is completely closed. They're all more or less open to the environment. And when musicians started to play around with these ideas, as very famously, for example, Louis and B.B. Barron did in making the music, very famously, for Forbidden Planet,

They really read Norbert Wiener's book, and they really thought about what this could mean. And they were obviously interested in developing circuits that wouldn't just simply repeat themselves, but would begin to have a life of their own. And they write very interestingly about building circuits, which were, okay, we can't really say alive, but they were lively. They had their own kind of sense of autonomy. And in this respect, they had their own kind of lifespan as well. They emerged, they did their thing, and they died, so to speak, as well. They happened, as music does, of course, in time. So we can see there's a lot of very direct connections between things that happen ordinarily in the making of music or the listening to music,

and these ideas from cybernetics, this idea of resonance, of amplification, common to them both. But perhaps what really connects them is, as a real kind of common feature, is something which is a kind of promise and a threat to both the traditional notion of music and to a conservative notion of a cybernetic loop, and that is the idea of noise. This is the kind of common term, really, which relates both to cybernetics and to music. In information terms, in terms of a cybernetic system, noise is what information in a system collapses into if the system collapses. Noise is kind of the outside of the system, everything which is excluded or unwanted by the system.

And, of course, in terms of more classical notions of music, noise is the residue, what threatens to disturb music itself. So in both contexts, noise is kind of the pre-organized or the disorganized or the unorganized, everything which is kind of the unwanted information. And to let noise into the system is a kind of fine art in both cybernetic terms and in terms of making music too. If you don't have enough openness, if you don't allow your system to be open enough to the kind of noise that can come in, to attend, for example, to all the glitches and errors and the outside interferences that may be, for example,

thrown up in the process of making electronic music, then you can end up with a very dull, paralyzed system with no innovation in it. For example, historically, to use the synthesizer simply to reproduce already existing instrumental noises would be a case in point, rather than allowing it to kind of reach for its own sound-making potential. On the other hand, too much experimentation, which might mean going too far beyond the kind of accepted boundaries of patterned sound to which people are receptive, to go too far beyond the conventions of music, obviously that can also lead us nowhere. So the trick, one might say, is to remain between the two extremes

to kind of sustain something which perhaps is not too musical in the conventional sense and not too noisy in the other sense. And it's very interesting how often you hear people that are on the sort of outer limit of this polarity making really very experimental music or sound art or very kind of noisy, noise sound work, let's say, who often then at the end of an interview or something say, oh, I would one day like to make something danceable as well, It is a kind of desire to find a way through these two poles. And Brian Eno spoke about this very problem in terms of variety. This is the term he used. How likely, how foreseeable, and therefore how predetermined outputs are

and how willing one is to allow a certain amount of variety into a system. So he had really his two poles, on the one hand, a maximum of variety, and the more conservative pole allowing as little as possible into the loop. So for him it was about both transmitting identity, that is enough to kind of keep the same going, as well as transmitting mutation to allow for enough variety as well. Of course, even in the most classical terms, the classical orchestra, you could say, is a system too. In fact, one can use kind of cybernetic thinking and look at anything at a big enough scale or a small enough scale as being a system. But you can also see that an orchestra, for example, is a very closed and stable system.

The whole notion of the composer, the score, the conductor, all of the hierarchies, the whole system is geared to ensure that there is no variety in the output, that what is put in is what comes out and that the outputs are entirely predictable. There's kind of no chance that something unexpected might take off. It is, in effect, a kind of very military way of thinking, one could say, a real kind of hierarchical system, the order of the military. And in cybernetics, too, the early ideas were developed very much in the context and the service of war. It really was a military technology, and cybernetics was very much about command, control, stability. and of course as I said before it is possible to imagine a closed negative feedback loop in a

simple simple circuit but as soon as you have some complexity as soon as you have some influence or interference from outside not to mention the fact that every even a closed circuit is also constantly interacting and interrelated to countless other circuits as well so if you like no circuit is there ever an island so there's a real limited sense in which it is really possible to talk about a closed circuit and as soon as something begins to become open then there's always a chance that it can set something else in motion that can gain its own sense of momentum and kind of begin to guide itself beyond what was intended or foreseeable and this is also really the history of cybernetics,

what began as a promotion of negative feedback in a simple loop, has now become, certainly in the cultural milieu, it's become much more of an interest in not so much positive feedback, but certainly the sense of complexity, of open systems, interactions, multiple engagements, and multiple scales of circuits at work. So I suppose now we would say that no loop is really an island, although Wiener really conceived of cybernetic loops as being little islands of activity in a world of entropy. But now perhaps we could say, well, no loop is really an entirely closed loop. If we look back to Eno's generation or this kind of first wave of people explicitly referencing cybernetics,

I think they really sometimes very rigorously used these ideas, sometimes, as in the case of Briony, more loosely, perhaps even metaphorically use them. But certainly it was a very, perhaps, useful set of ideas which perhaps allowed this generation to tread or to begin to explore a line between too much chaos, too much indeterminacy on the one hand and too much a sense of order on the other. Now, of course, we can say, well, what does all this have to do with feminism? and I would say there are at least three really strands of what I've spoken about which have some kind of purchase on the question of gender and feminism. One is this whole question about

kind of expression beyond representation. One is the issue about noise. But the one that I will just mention now is really much more to stick with this theme of cybernetics cybernetics, because it seems to me that even at its most conservative, cybernetics is fundamentally destabilizing of traditional notions of the kind of philosophical hierarchy in which we have active human subjects, on the one hand, operating with tools on inert kind of material life on the other hand. And the very notion of having this kind of autonomous system really undermines the idea that one needs an exterior determining, dominating agent to make things

happen. So it really kind of is a, not just a philosophical, but a very kind of technological challenge to the idea of the author, if you like, or the composer, the performer, all of these kind of individuated roles. And in de-centering and undermining this role of the human subject as the one kind of giving form to inanimate tools, using inanimate instruments and operating on inanimate matter, instead what it tends to do is really assert the kind of inherent liveliness of tools and materials and certainly of the systems in which they're all engaged. it kind of has the effect of drawing this subject into the circuits, which then in turn have their own momentum. And while obviously in the field of music there is this kind of continual reassertion

of the role of the performer, the composer, the conductor, they keep, of course, coming back, there is also a very deep tendency to integrate or deep potential to integrate these roles and this subject into bigger processes of the making of music. And as I mentioned before, I feel this is true even at the level of playing an instrument. If one allows oneself to think about it, to be kind of wrapped around a guitar, for example, or sat at the piano, is really to engage with a technical device in a way which goes way beyond, let's say, the visual artist with the paintbrush or the writer with the pen. and the last 50 years of technological innovations

which have impacted on music have, I would say, to those who want it, have really given much more room to pursue these ideas of a kind of loss of authorial control. Music has become, in many respects, a matter of playing around with kind of found elements, let's say, with the introduction of the sampler, even in terms now of distribution of music. its kind of ineffable nature is almost reasserting itself. It's becoming much more a matter of collaborations, of cooperations. And the role of the musician has perhaps become much more one of the engineer, of the tinkerer, the adjuster. Relatively minor roles, I would suggest,

rather than the kind of celebrity status of traditionally the case in music. Now these are of course roles to which women have always historically been relegated. They're always considered to be the kind of feminized roles. But I would like to suggest that these are ways of working in the world and certainly ways of working with music which in fact do have great potential both as ways of thinking about the role of how we operate with our technologies and with our tools, but also perhaps to take on these more minor roles in our lives in general. Okay, I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sadie.

We'll just go straight on and do all the presentations first before we come to questions, so take it away. Thank you. Thank you, Annie. Thank you, Sadie. Do you hear me on the microphone? It's not on? Ah, no, okay. Well, I will just give you a practical example, and I'm very happy that I can directly refer to what you just were talking about, Sadie. It's actually a typical example of my musical work, and it tries to find a way between chaos and order. It's a track, a new track, not finished yet, that I've been working on in the past weeks.

It can be considered a derivative work of a composition I made in 2012 called Chiffre. For that composition, I had about 17 people record themselves, counting from 0 to 20 in their mother tongues, or dialects respectively. And the track is called Seven. And the basic raw material that I used to generate most of its significant sounds is a collection of sevens. Let me just play you the basic raw material for pretty much everything I did in this track.

7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 All right, so the first thing I wanted to do with it was to create a rhythmical element that has a very dense character and also features the typical characteristics of the word seven in really many languages.

Many languages have a hissing sound with their word for seven. My favorite tool to work with sounds to transform sounds is Max for Life device by Robert Henke and it's called Granulator. Here we are, this is a granulator. It plays back grains in many different ways. You see there are a lot of parameters that the user can adjust. And the collection of sevens that I just played to you in the original version lies here in the granulator.

So my basic tempo for the track is 131 BPM. And this is relevant because I tried to create something, some fuzziness that is still rhythmical and fits to the tempo, but deviates from like a very simple and very clear, typical techno beat. The way I did this was to chose carefully the grain size and to use... Oh, I'm in the wrong track here. This is the right granulator. And to use an LFO that makes the granulator cycle through the whole originating file in a tempo

that correlates with the track tempo. I use here 56 point or 58.6, no, 56.8, I can't read it right now, seconds. That is actually, the track I just played you is exactly 16 bars long. There are two sevens per bar. 16 bars in 131 BPM take 28.3 seconds. So if the cycle is 58.6, then it goes through and goes back within the cycle. And the resulting sound using a certain grain size and also quite significantly FM modulation creates this.

So naturally it cycles pretty slowly, but I promise you it goes through the whole thing. it has, it correlates to 130 ppm. I'll play you like the click with it. So you see what I mean? There is a fuzziness, but it still correlates. The next thing I tried was, and that I used,

was to scan through in a different mode. I used the same original file here in the granulator and I did not do the LFO on the file position to cycle through, but I used the scan function. I used it in two ways. First in 200%, which means it's slower and it plays like one seven per bar. And in 100%, which is the original tempo, and plays two sevens in one bar. And it sounds like this. and so on.

I wanted it to be recognizable, similar to lyrics in the song, but then not really, and still transformed and clearly processed. and this is like the 100 Okay, then what I like to do is to take these resulting sounds and further process them One thing is that I used like the very first sound, granulated sound that I played you I play it again for you

It's this one. And I put it again in the granulator and it lies here in the display. And it does create a totally different sound that is very strongly influenced by FM modulation, that in this case is actually also a function of velocity. It sounds like this. Okay, so this is all, it all comes from the same original sound. Then I had this sound that I just played and thought, okay, I want to have something,

some drones as well. And on the one hand, some melodic drones, and on the other hand, some noisy drones. The first thing I did was I took this very granulated sound, here it is again, and I sent it through two devices in the return chains in the way that it is set to a pre-mixer, so you don't hear the original sound, you only hear the process sound. All right, what I did here was I sent this granulated 7s to a spectral drone maker.

This is Michael Norris, who does audio unit plugins that I really love to use. Soundmagic Spectral, it is called. It's a whole plugin suite. And the DroneMaker creates this sound out of it. Play you... This was the Spectre Drone Maker alone, but I was not yet satisfied. I wanted to have more space with it, so I sent this again to another device.

Again a Max for Life device by Robert Henkel, a really new one. a reverb that has some features similar to a convolution reverb but it's actually not it can create very strong very unique sounds and this is how it sounds in in my case Okay, so this is how I created the melodic drones out of the granulated sevens. I still wanted to have some other drones as well. I took again like the same like the the hissing rhythmical element

and sent it through to so-called spectral drone maker, grain freeze. So we know this already. And I have the grain freeze here. So it gets the original signal. signal and then I freeze it and I get like a noisy drone. All right. So I needed some rhythmical elements as well.

I used another collection of sevens to create this rather sharp sound that I did use similar to a shaker. So it is repeated like within a certain rhythmical scheme, but of course it doesn't sound like a normal drum machine, it sounds more like a voice. I made another one that is actually the basis for my hi-hats. From this sound right here, I made some very regular hi-hat, like this. Because sometimes my problem is I'm losing myself a little bit in the possibilities of sounds and of the drones and the shifting rhythms and stuff.

And it actually makes my tracks many times a little bit difficult to access. So for the listener, it becomes really difficult to understand what I'm trying to do with my music. So I decided, okay, this track, if it has rhythm, it needs a very straight and simple hi-hat because everything else is already constantly changing and transforming. And to close my presentation, I decided that I would like to play you also what the intro of the new track that consists of the elements except the hi-hats that I just showed you.

And it sounds like this. The The End

I'm sorry. So that was the intro.

Thank you very much for your attention. Okay, so hi. I'd want to just say thank you again to Annie for organizing this. It's a really nice opportunity to talk about some kind of ideas and themes that I've sort of been exploring in my work and it's nice to kind of connect it to some other stuff. I'm probably going to read quite a bit from paper because otherwise I tend to go off topic and talk about things that probably don't relate to this panel. So I'm going to use this as an opportunity to talk

about some of my ongoing work that explores the relationship between noise and sticking to the theme of noise and cultural constructions of femininity. And this kind of project started as a slightly tongue-in-cheek, but also kind of deadly serious manifesto that I created for an art exhibition called Thinking Ourselves Into Existence, which was around the possibilities of experimental music. and it was curated by a collective called Psychic Dance Hall and John Marshall from Singing Knives. And I had initially conceived of this as a hopefully constructive response

or reaction to much of the kind of implicit or explicit machoism of much of what we might call noise theory. And these kind of theoretical explorations of noise often involve celebrations of noise's libertarian potential, both aesthetically and politically. So I was kind of interested in some of these themes. And since this panel is exploring the kind of where to with cyberfeminism, it seems pertinent that one of the texts that sparked my interest in the relationship between noise and constructions of the feminine was Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto. And in this, Donna Harawai describes the cyborg politics as, quote, the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of fellow logocentrism.

That's why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animals and machines. And I'll come back to the kind of figure of the cyborg later. So just to kind of move on to this project of sort of feminine or feminized noises, there are a number of pejorative stereotypes and popular imaginations that cast women as noisy. and this imagined noise of women particularly with regard to feminine speech and conversation is marked in the languages of various cultures in derogatory and unflattering terms so just to give you a few in Japanese and there is the saying that three women together mean din in a dictionary

published by the Swedish Academy 16 compound nouns paired a word referencing talk with a word for woman, including the charming gossip hag. And in Bedouin culture, the potential danger of women's noise is implied in the saying that men's talk is full, but women's is empty. Whenever two women talk, there is the devil between them. So these stereotypes of women as noisy are often accompanied by commendations of women's silence as virtuous, as I'm sure many of you are familiar with. This virtuous feminine silence, or more often or accurately silencing, can be understood as a form of noise abatement. I've tried to think of this kind of discourse around women and silencing as having a connection to the idea of noise abatement.

I think that this kind of celebration of a virtuous silence points to what is ultimately a fear, distrust, or contempt for feminine or feminized noises. noises that are perceived as dangerous to the ears of a patriarchal order. So I've explored this kind of relationship between noise and constructions of femininity, primarily in relation to three figures. And there is the gossip, the siren, and what I label the hi-fi wife. So just to kind of explain these kind of three figures, gossip was actually originally a friendly term for a godparent. however it's evolved into a pejorative term for women with loose lips and on one level the gossip of gossips is heard as meaningless extraneous chatter

it is sonic excess derived from the purported verbal incontinence of women and the notion of gossip as sonic surplus devoid of meaning or function is also mirrored in the body of gossips, or certainly the imagination of the body of gossips. So there is a characterization of gossip as unattractive, undesirable talk, originating from the mouths of unattractive, undesirable women, the witches, the crones, and the gossip hags. The old wives of old wives tales are women who have outlived their reproductive function and fertility, existing as a grotesque excess of feminine matter. Yet while often dismissed as meaningless and extraneous, gossip can also be threatening. Indeed, gossip carries with it the idea that, as Baston states,

women talking together make trouble for men, since men and their wrongdoings are often imagined to be the subject of women's idle chatter. So often there is this imagination that gossip carries with it the threat of exposure, details of wrongdoings or illicit affairs that have the potential to undermine the moral superiority of those who hold power are carried across in barely audible whisters. And these kind of messages or kind of forms of information are carried across illegal or informal channels. And that's kind of where some of this danger arises. Then we have the figure of the siren who is perhaps more familiar.

And the siren is considered to be a powerful and monstrous distraction, a anomalous hybrid of bird and woman, which, like the gossip, supposedly feeds on the misfortune of men. So the siren's song is both seductive and fatal, both alluring and destructive. And her voices guide sailors to the demise on the rocky shores of her island. So the siren's noise captures the spirit, overpowering both body and mind. It serves to interrupt rational thought, and it's supposedly the cause of madness in men. And so the third term, the hi-fi wife, refers to the demonized spouses of post-war American hi-fi owners. In hi-fi magazines and journals from the 1950s,

wives were frequently cast as a literal interference in the channel, resulting in a derogation of the signal. So their complaints about the volume at which music is played or their insistence of talking over music, treating it as background music, not listening properly, interrupts the transcendental musical moment where the audiophile is transported to the favourites in the concert hall. Consequently, in these kind of discourses, the wife is construed as the enemy of the hi-fi. So these three figures, the gossip, the siren, and the hi-fi wife, connect to a number of ideas of noise. So, for example, extraneousness, meaninglessness, interruptive, dangerous, damaging, and aesthetically ugly,

all ideas that we might connect to noise. More generally, these feminine or feminized noises are all deemed unwanted, negative, or detrimental. However, I want to consider these examples in relation to a different understanding of noise, which might point to why they're considered negative. So, this alternative understanding, which I've explored kind of in my work elsewhere, differs from both a subject-oriented definition, which treats noise as a negative subjective judgment of sound and thus assumes noise to be inherently bad, and an object-oriented definition that understands noise to be a type of sound or sonic artifact. So, for example, complex, non-periodic or non-tonal sounds. Instead, drawing upon an informational definition of noise,

which can be found in the work of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, noise can be understood as a transformative force. And I've conceptualized this in terms of affect, but I won't go into that here. I don't think there's time, really. So according to Shannon's general model of communication, noise pertains to anything that interferes with and thus modifies a signal in its transmission from sender to receiver. Noise, then, is not viewed as a particular sonic artifact nor a subjective judgment. rather it is constituted by a transformative relation. In other words, noise does something, and it is this doing which defines it as such. According to Shannon, moreover, noise has a necessary presence. A signal cannot be transmitted without being affected by some degree of noise,

hence noise's inclusion within Shannon's general model. This is because the material medium, which is the means of transmission, is always noisy. it always affects and changes the signal to some degree. The noiseless channel, then, is mostly an ideal abstraction, a material impossibility. So this alternative informational understanding of noise can be applied to the examples of the gossip, the siren, and the hi-fi wife. Their noise is deemed negative not only because of its lack of meaning or ugliness, but because of its transformative capacity, because of what it does or threatens to do. As I have already noted, the voice of the hi-fi wife

interferes with the transmission of the hi-fi, rupturing the transcendental listening experience of the audiophile husband. The siren's song interferes with reason, and in doing so draws the sailors to their demise. The gossip's idle chatter, which is suspected to contain details of wrongdoings and transgressions, or perhaps even the rumblings of a collectivised discontent, threatens to damage reputations or cause trouble for those who hold authority. These sounds then are not just unwanted but potentially transformative, or rather they are unwanted because of their transformative potential. So just to kind of raise a point perhaps for discussion later, talking of a feminized noise tends to raise the question of essentialism. More specifically, does talking of a feminized noise require us to take an essentialist position?

On the one hand, the association of noise with femininity that I look to explore stems from what is ordinarily a misogynist and essentializing historical narrative, that women are helplessly naturally noisy, certainly by comparison to their male counterparts. On the other hand, I'm not looking to argue that noise is woman's essence or anything like that, nor do I intend to speak of woman as a pre-political, pre-given, stable, fixed identity. Furthermore, it's interesting to note that the most dangerously noisy women, according to this patriarchal narrative at least, are those who are themselves noises within a system of binary identities. They're altogether more queer figures that rattle the separations of women from machine,

human from animal, nature from culture. The gossip hags and the witches, for example, are women who have exceeded their reproductive capacity and are demonized as such. The siren is this frightening hybrid of bird and animal. And of course, there's Haraway's cyborg, which rejoices in the illegitimate fusions of natural bodies and artificial technologies. If we think of noise beyond unwanted sound as something disruptive and transformative, could and how might these feminized noises that I've kind of thought about become useful and strategic? Would this simply be an abstract theoretical game, or might there be a more practical dimension? Or is this simply yet another recuperation and making bad as something good?

Or can there be something more? And I remain unsure in this. This is kind of my cop-out. I'm not quite sure what to do now with this and where to take it. Nonetheless, the question of embracing sort of these questions of feminine or feminized noises, of what noise might do, remains somewhat alluring to me. So thank you. So, hello. I'm Fender and my work and interest around transgender and sound culture is a

research driven out of my practice as a media engineer, a sound engineer, light designer, musician and performer, and as a transgender identified person in daily life. In my talk today I will speak about my experiences as a live sound engineer. I will discuss this in relation to working with technology. I will discuss the position of the live sound engineer that is conventionally understood as a technician. And further, I will give you a glimpse of the problems that exist in this field in practice, especially in relation to a transfeminist position and possibilities of intervention. From 1994 to 2003, it's a time ago, I was involved in more than

2,000 live events of different size from 2 up to 20,000 spectators or more as a so-called front of house or system engineer. I started working in this field because as a musician and a trans-identified person I often felt exposed with my gender identity on stage. Becoming a live sound engineer made it possible for me to work musically because my body wasn't such an obvious part of the performance anymore. So I sort of took my instrument from the stage in the middle of the crowd, behind the eyes of the audience and out of the light. This allowed me personally to create an acoustic space, to

continue to create the acoustic space musically. In terms of my gender identity, working as a live sound engineer was, and finally still is, also a possibility to reconnect to people. While in society being trans is often not respected or accepted or even pathologized, The work at a mixing console in between the audience and the musicians provided me a space to connect to the people around me. This musical and technical interaction let me become part of the crowd again. How certain sounds are to be perceived in an immersive sonic environment

is as important as the sound itself. With this quote from composer and sound artist Marian Amacher in mind, I will draw your attention on the more invisible part of live sound engineering. With working at a live concert at a mixing console, I am making sonic connections between the musicians on stage, the room and the audience. As my talk is entitled, I am performing between their bodies, I mean the musicians' bodies and your ears, I perceive this work of creating an immersive sonic atmosphere as well as a spiritual and emotional experience

for everyone who takes part in the concert as the primary and the most creative aspect of live sound engineering. Live sound engineering arose in the late 60s along with a culture of bigger live concerts they are amplified electronically. Over the last 40 years concert sound developed a sonic aesthetic of its own. Now let me shape your senses for a moment for the tools of live sound engineering. What you hear is not my voice, what you hear is my electronic amplified voice. This voice you hear is shaped by the chain of amplification, that means the microphone, the cable,

it will go back to the mixer, it will be processed and everything comes back, goes in the amplifier over there, goes to the loudspeaker, reflects on the wall and then it goes to your ears. My electronic voice is shaped by the architecture here in this room. And my electronic voice is also shaped by the treatment of the gear. My electronic amplified voice will sound and touch you different with other equipment, with another way of using the equipment. For example, if I change here or do something else or take this away or so on. Yeah, with another use of equipment in a different room, maybe because this room, for example, has a lot of reverberation.

Yeah, in another room, maybe there would be less reverberation. It will sound and touch you different. And finally, it will sound and touch you different even through your bodies. Because maybe some of you experienced this already, a room full of people sound completely different than a room without or an empty room. empty room. Looking at feminism and gender, I experienced that all female and queer bands were looking especially for feminist or queer feminist live sound creators for permanent collaboration. As a fully included member of the band myself, I discovered and understood

the mixing console and the PA system as a musical instrument. Well, as I said, an instrument And what is not played on stage, it is played in between the audience, in between you. My work as a live sound engineer was and still is deeply influenced by my own fluid gender identity. It had a big impact on the working conditions I got and also the way my colleagues treated me. To situate myself, I used to identify myself as a woman and a lesbian and now I am a transgender-identified person. I was working sometimes in a feminist or queer context,

but to make a living, most of the time in a straight male-dominated setup. But let me give you an example now how my gender identity led to my approach on Lifesound. I tell you now a bit how I worked as a Lifesound engineer when I was touring with bands through clubs and festivals. I was in my mid-twenties when I arrived at the venue. I found more or less exclusively analog equipment for creating the sound. What you see behind it is like a typical working place for doing live sound.

Further, when I arrived at the menu, I met a local technician or engineer who is in charge and should be familiar with the equipment and the local conditions. Usually, live sound engineers do a sound check before a concert, where they kind of experiment with the sound. They try different levels, different volumes, they try to find feedback frequencies, the adjusting effects and try to figure out how it sounds in this venue. Well, this common method didn't work for me as it doesn't prove to produce a satisfying sound. I developed a practice for myself in which I create my sound without a pre-concert soundcheck.

I do the sound during the first song of a concert. This strategy didn't result from an artistic or technological reason. This strategy resulted from an experience at a particular concert event in which I had to stop in the middle of a soundcheck. My colleagues tried to change my settings and adjustments I did on the console, which means they tried to change my mix during I did the soundcheck. As I experienced this regularly, I was fed up and I realized that I needed to change my way of working with this. So I reduced the check to a simple functioning check of testing the system instead of doing an extended musical sound check.

Further, when I arrived at the venue, I spent a lot of time in listening to the space, walking around, noticing how the sound interacts with the architecture of the room, and looking on the console to understand how it works. But then, when people enter the venue at concert time, and the technicians are at dinner, I readjust the console to my needs. First, I started to adjust channel by channel with the settings I remembered, for example from the last show I did with the band. To remember each position of the knob and sliders by mind,

I work very visually with having a picture of every channel or its sound in my mind. Second, to prove this memory-based adjustments, I work conceptually with considering if these settings I made would make sense from a technical point of view. The more experience I got over the years with rooms, equipment and people, the easier I found it to make even predictions for myself which frequencies in the room would need a special treatment during the shows. For example, their over-represented frequencies or feedback frequencies, things like that.

Prepared with this setup, I developed the sound in the first few minutes of a concert, when everyone is in the room, when the room is heating up and all the bodies are present. Finally, I hear the sound the first time now and tune it among the audience. Well, this is one of my personal strategies in live sound engineering, which I developed over years of experience. It is a very acoustic, visual and as well as improvisational strategy. I watch the room, explore it with walking through, looking at the speakers, check the positions and so on. I also approach the console in a very visual and conceptual manner.

And as I said, as I worked in this way with analog equipment, where I had access to every parameter, as you can see here, on the top level. As a result, I used less dynamic processors. For example, I rarely or even never used noise gates for my live sound. Even it was very popular and common to use noise gates on 90s drums for shaping the sound. For those who don't have experience in using noise gates, before I dig deeper into audio technology, not to use noise gates meant at that time it was like riding a skateboard without doing tricks.

Control is at the core of traditional engineering. This becomes apparent for example when looking at the last 50 years of technical developments of electro-acoustic amplification at a live sound event. It is dominated by the idea that sound in a room needs to be controlled and that it can be controlled and governed by a technology that works with the idea of controlling. Up to a certain point, it is fine, but at the same time, the parameters that actually influence a life event and its sound are rather variable as well as non-stable.

A room sounds completely different when it's inhabited by people. The room temperature changes with the amount of bodies in it. and in and of itself affects the sound. The sound is also affected by the individual state of the musicians, their emotional sensivities and the emotional interaction between the audience and the music. Thus, the perception of sound cannot be handled with the approach or idea of controlling. As a result, the main work at the live console is to constantly adapt to these procedural changes and to respond with a musical, creative, intuitive answer.

In my opinion, the role of the sound engineer is defined by one's ability to interact with these constantly changing elements rather than aim for a control of them. In approaching live sound engineering as an artistic rather than an exclusively technological practice, it becomes a field of intervention and interaction for me. This intervention and interaction is creative as well as political in a transfeminist way. Looking at engineering from my professional experience and from my trans feminist perspective, I see a huge challenge in terms of hacking into the conventional way of working,

in sense of questioning production roles, in sense of working with hard and software. Furthermore, it would be necessary to replace the still existing sexist and exclusionary terminology on the surface of sound technology, manuals and circuit plans. This is an unbearable language in trans-feminist and anti-racist contexts, but actually it should be intolerable for all engineers and for everyone who uses or builds equipment. It is important to make interventions here to find new words and to develop a different language for sound engineering.

Treating technology different as a transfeminist, queer or feminist engineer or musician extends politics into sonic space. Thank you. Thank you so much for these four really wonderful and very varied presentations. really, I think, in many ways touching a lot of crossover and a lot of really interesting, almost unexpected crossovers in the themes here. So I think I'd like to return to this idea of cyberfeminism

to try and bring all these talks and topics together. Maybe to begin with you, Sadie. As you mentioned, the kind of immersive nature of music and sound and also the kind of possibilities within cybernetics in the traditional sense of the potentiality of rupture and the kind of simultaneous stability and potential for change and complete flux. Why do you think it is, or why could it be that music never played a big role in cyberfeminism, perhaps?

Or how do music and sound maybe fit into cybernetics in this sense? I honestly don't know. I really don't have a good answer to that. And as I was preparing for this talk, I must say, I kept thinking, I don't know why, certainly I don't know why, I've never really paid more attention to really kind of, you know, theorising around music. Well, as I said to start with, I do know why I didn't, because I just didn't like the idea of kind of theorising around music. Somehow for me, it didn't seem to be, you know, the right way to deal with music, probably. but of course there's been so much talk about

for example these issues in terms of the visual arts and maybe in a sense because of the predominance of if one accepts that we live in a visually dominant culture and if one also accepts that that is I won't say a problem but an issue that has to be dealt with in terms of a broader kind of feminist thinking and maybe is to some extent part of the structure that one needs to tackle, that maybe it has been a challenge which was at least kind of a realisable problem I suppose in terms of the visual arts to contest the notion

that woman has always been or the feminine has been for example, what is represented the female is always on the other side of the canvas and there's a very tangible problem at least to critique when it comes to then putting the woman let's say in the role of the artist and bringing her to the other side of the canvas so to speak or say in photography to putting the woman on this side of the camera I'm sure much of what Fender's just said about being a sound engineer if you speak to women who've worked as camera women or as photographers, I mean, these are in many respects very common problems. But yeah, I would have thought

that there really was almost more potential and more kind of room for maneuver for women feeling that they have, you know, some, I won't say some kind of privileged access to the sonic, but at least not feeling excluded from it. You know, it seems to me that there is such a kind of rich territory to be explored there that really would connect the sonic and the feminine with all of the dangers and difficulties as Marie said about essentialism or not and so on but I think all that isn't that can all be taken on board and dealt with in an interesting way so I yeah, in a direct answer I don't know why it has never been taken up so much and I think it really could and should be and I think it would perhaps there would be a potential to perhaps

to maybe give women more confidence to enter that field. And maybe that would help with this whole issue about what a difficult field it is to enter. Maybe it is not just on a kind of social, economic, political kind of level, but maybe there are these more sort of philosophical questions that need to be thought through. Great, thanks. Yeah, it kind of links into my next question, which was more to do with Susanna. Thanks so much for showing us an insight into your work. I really like this kind of laying bare the bones of your working process. I think it's also an interesting approach to kind of come close to almost theorizing through sound or kind of philosophizing thinking through sound.

I wondered you kind of as a producer and musician, also as an activist and a political person, Does this have a relation to the way you work and the way you, for example, run female pressure and you have this, your status in the world? Is it strategic? Do you also make music in a strategic way? No, I don't. I mean, it's like an inherent ambivalency in the whole female pressure thing because I became a DJ because I liked the music and I wanted to play it out. and the whole problem of being a woman in a male-dominated scene was then like, appeared to me later on.

I didn't know when I started, in a way. This was not conscious. I was not conscious about it. So, all creative activities that I do do relate in a very common sense to maybe my social status, my geographical status, my gender status, but I don't do it because I'm a feminist and I don't creatively implement my political viewpoints. No, I don't. I mean, as a matter of fact, I do a lot of collaborations with other female musicians and composers and producers,

but that happens because of common interests and not because of a political strategy. Okay, great, thanks. Okay, now a question for Marie. I love the way you phrase these, where you kind of draw out these three figures in feminizing noise and the examples that you give. I'm really interested in this idea of noise as transformation. And as you, as a kind of musicologist, or you are based in an institute of musicologists, this kind of tension between music and sound as affect which is often overlooked in traditional musicology at least and if you could say something

a bit more about these, yeah, this tension within musicology maybe. Yeah, I mean it's really interesting what Sadie was saying, kind of her kind of view of kind of non-representation and that being kind of something very appealing about music And sort of my background has been from working in university music departments where perhaps this kind of non-representational, ineffable status of music has perhaps been slightly more problematic. And it has led to certainly conservatism in terms of how we talk about music and how music is viewed and even how I think music is experienced. and as someone interested in affect in many ways sort of musicology and music studies have kind of

not really wanted to talk about this because there's always been a slight awkwardness around talking about kind of performing bodies like it's it's a kind of unfortunate cliche but certainly in the UK generally speaking there is still an emphasis on speaking about the composer and his works and looking at scores and kind of a historical musicology background. And even in kind of popular musicology, dealing with kind of slightly more contemporary subjects, even we still have this kind of individual and their works kind of mode of understanding. So, yeah, and I kind of think that part of how we talk about music and this kind of conservative understanding of music is precisely because there is this attitude of,

well, you can't really write about music. It's very difficult to write about music. So we will hang on to the things that we can pin down. We can talk about the score. We can talk about the kind of history. But music is kind of relegated to this transcendental realm that you can't really touch. And certainly in musicology, that has led to perhaps overlooking some important socio-political, economic questions that remain quite troubling. And for me, affect theory perhaps hangs on a little to those kind of, sort of the power kind of, without sounding too cheesy, kind of the power of music and the power of sound and exactly what you were saying about this kind of immediacy

and the way in which it can affect us in ways that we might not kind of have complete control over, really kind of challenging some of the kind of rationalist narratives around experience. But it doesn't rely on us returning to this kind of sublime, ineffable, transcendental moment either. So for me, affect is kind of a nice way between those things, I guess. Great, thanks. Fender, I have a question for you. So, I really love the way you talk about your practice, and I was interested why you used the term transfeminist, so why you chose to use this term, and what maybe this means,

and how we can understand it. Okay, I used transgender for myself to describe my identity, but for this talk I thought the word transfeminist would be good, because especially in avant-garde and electronic music, feminist ideas or feminist influences are something that is totally missing. Sound and avant-garde music is something that really frees up everything, And on the other side, if I see the structure of people who are involved and who work there, it is like what I experienced, one of the most conservative fields in terms of diversity.

So therefore, an intervention with feminist ideas and feminist energy is really necessary. But this goes on, therefore I used trans feminism, because also in music and sound there is a history of transgender and a kind of feminism, feminism, what is more separated, what has more separated structure. It has a history that, especially in this field of sound, transgender people are excluded. For example, there's still this rock music festival in Michigan where trans women are not allowed to take

part. Therefore I thought it would be nice to combine these two terms for this talk, because I think the force of intervention should include both. I've got a bit more of a general question, something that really interests me. Coming to cyber feminism more from almost naive interest in women in technology and finding Sadie's book whenever I read that several years ago. There seems to be a bit of a tension which had happened and now maybe I have a slightly

warped view of it. So 70s feminism which had different aims and also so it took part in a different historical context and everything. But as I understand it, cyberfeminism was trying to get away from this idea of womanly, mother earth nature and leaving technology as kind of men's things. And I think in a way, cyberfeminism was a reaction against this to reclaim technology. I think part of me almost tends to interpret this as a loss of the body or a removal of the body into the machine almost in its most extreme form.

I was just wondering if that's valid or if that's a misreading. This idea of body comes out a lot in all of your talks also. The immersivity of sound. is it a danger, perhaps Sadie or Marie would like to answer, is it a danger to lose the body or is it pure potentiality? Is it an amazing chance to create everything from new from scratch in a kind of exciting way? I would say this kind of moment of cyberfeminism was partly a reaction to a more mainstream kind of utopianism,

which probably I then, at least now, actually, would have said was this very kind of masculinist desire to escape from the body. That was a big part of this whole early wave of interest in cyberspace and cyberpunk and cyber this and cyber that. And that was part of the impulse to kind of think, well, actually, what is this cyber stuff? what is cybernetics and what is it really about? And it seems to me that partly what it is really about and what it can be used for is precisely to reinsert the body. That's not to say the body has this already fixed, stable fact of life, of course, but it is definitely to talk about materiality and it's to talk about the female

as not just, you know, on the one hand, not just a kind of social construct, because that was also another, you know, strand of contemporary feminism, that it was just all political and you could just choose what you want to be and, you know, the body's completely irrelevant. I mean, a lot of feminism really went down that road. On the other hand, yes, you had this kind of, you know, earth mother, milk and honey kind of feminism that was also, you know, kind of problematic, I felt. but I think it doesn't seem to me that hard to find a way through these things by using these ideas around technology maybe we're a bit too quick just to think of technology as nuts and bolts and machines and information and stuff but what really happened I think 20 years ago or so

was that a lot of ideas which had been talked about in theory or philosophically you could suddenly actually see, could be made to work and you could see them working on your computer screen, quite literally. This kind of 70s thing, wouldn't it be wonderful if there were more lateral networks of communication? And then 90s, oh, there are these lateral networks of communication, for example. I mean, I'm obviously being grossly generalizing here, but that was the beauty of the technology was that it does actually show you how things do work. And then it's not a matter of just philosophical speculation. You've got something real to kind of think with. When you can then see, you know, ways of working which challenge

what you could broadly call a kind of patriarchal, hierarchical, binary kind of thinking, when you can see that there are actually technically alternatives possible to that, then you can see that systems, you know, the same kind of networks and circuits are possible, on the level of ideas, of bodies, of machines. This is exactly where it cuts through all these things and by no means excludes the body, but in fact, as I say, I would say, really reinserts it into theory and more philosophical thinking in a way that it just hadn't been possible before. Yeah, I'd say that my reading had always been

that it wasn't so much denying the body or trying to replace the body with the machinic necessarily, but was kind of challenging the idea of what it means to be a body and having a rethinking or reconfiguring of that notion, often kind of coming from a more Cartesian idea of what it is a body and, you know, it's good to spinozis, you know, what a body can do as well. These questions of what can we do if we kind of do away with this kind of particular paradigm, then we have a question of what is possible, what can we do? As well, that question about technology and the imagination of technology as something external, as something kind of nuts and bolts, as something perhaps metallic. So from a kind of musical perspective, again,

you have a slightly different view of this. I mean, to kind of go back to a kind of stereotypical topic of the voice, the ways in which we sometimes think of the voice as a technology in music and just not necessarily kind of the electronic voice and the mic voice, but the kind of bodily produced voice, the corporeal voice, as it were, and how we might think of that, you know, in terms of technology as well. So there are kind of these spaces and these connections between ideas, certainly in relation to music and sound and some of the concerns of kind of cyber feminism and when i was kind of encountering some of this stuff those connections and you know stuff that sadie was saying about the idea of um not just kind of acting upon a passive object or whatever and

and these relations of activity and passivity and kind of rethinking those things um was very appealing to me not just as someone who thinks about music but as someone who makes it as well I had to also think about Susanne's kind of sound examples. Can you say anything there about the, you take, in this example you had voice as the kind of source material and you almost alienated it so much, so there was a kind of degree of we couldn't tell it was voices anymore. Is this a, yeah, maybe you can say a few words about this in relation to that. I love to, it's actually in the past years, I've been working a lot with spoken human voices.

It originates from a commissioned work together with an author from Graz, Valerie Fritsch, and we were commissioned to do a work together, like a sort of reading concert mix kind of thing. And there I started to transform her voice, reading her own text and create music out of that. And it's just very satisfying to see what I can do with voice. And it probably also relates to my interest in linguistics. I've been studying this back in the 80s,

and to the deconstruction of both meaning and sounds that make language and to combine also different languages is just a very rich material that I can use for all sorts of transformations and processings. And I also find it interesting to play around with characteristic sounds and have a slow transformation from very concrete sounds to very abstract sounds.

And I've been... I wanted to, for example, I'm still trying to, and I have not succeeded yet, create a rhythm that slowly evolves from some sort of very diffuse noise. I couldn't satisfyingly do so yet. For me it's a very interesting basic material to work on and it might have to do with my aversion to lyrics in music and singing in music. And I noticed with my work with female pressure and with listening to a lot of the music

that the female colleagues make, that it's rather a cliché that women have to sing on their own music. I mean, they all produce music, and so many of them have to sing on top of it. I mean, I understand it. When I was a child, I went to music school, and I sang in a choir. And I know the experience. It's absolutely fascinating. It's the most fascinating instrument I can imagine, the human voice. And the experience when you sing is fantastic. Your whole body is like the resonating corpus that creates the voice.

And it is a very physical experience. So I can completely relate to the wish to sing. But I find it a bit awkward that so many of the female electronic musicians have to sing on top of their abstract music. Some like to scream. I mean, even before I started with female pressure, I never liked vocal house, for example. This is just not my style. and I can remember even like, I don't know if many, of course you all probably know Basic Channel and Basic Channel started in the early 90s when I still worked at Hardworks and maybe in 94 or 95 they came up with Main Street Records which was their house label

and I remember Moritz came to Hardworks and he played the very first Main Street record and which I like now. But back in the days, I combined Gava records with Detroit techno. And he played it to me and I said, well, I don't like the singing. And he was really offended. So I'm maybe not the right person to judge this objectively and correctly. But this is why it interests me to work with human voices and to transform it to a very abstract level. Yeah, no, no. I think it ties in really interestingly with this question of representation

of woman in sound. So as is often discussed, the voice of a woman, as Marie discussed, as unwanted and gossip, noise, meaningless. lack of information. So I think it's interesting as an artistic position to notice in oneself, okay, I have a kind of tendency not to want to use especially my own voice in my music maybe as a kind of, yeah, a trend away from maybe the norm or into this anonymity almost which I guess is one interpretation of cyber feminism almost like relishing in this

in the possibility of um yeah of technology um I think does anybody have any questions or any burning issues that they'd like to raise we have one here do we have a roaming mic no Hello, yeah. So thank you for really interesting position statements. And thanks, Annie, for putting this event on. I think it was really, really, really great. I had one question relating, I think, mainly to Sadie's talk. Sadie, you spoke a lot about how electronic music culture in a way drew on cybernetic imaginaries

or cybernetic theories to come up with ways of producing music which was kind of anti-hierarchical, or maybe I think you spoke of the loss of the kind of aim of losing the authorial control, usually associated with music production. And I think then this was really kind of exemplified nicely by the two kind of practice-based works by Susanna and by Fender. My question was, isn't there a huge kind of disparity gap between a way in which there are now numerous ways of kind of feminizing or queering production methods that kind of entirely clash with the dissemination channels or kind of output channels

of clubs, labels even, which tend to be kind of very hierarchically organized and not at all in a way obeying the same aspiration even of a kind of certain I don't know loss or communalization of control. It kind of tries to allude to this exact problem because I really agree with you I think I would explain it in terms of a kind of well maybe in cybernetic terms actually as a kind of overcompensation you know there is the feeling that things slip away from the hands of the master controller. And, you know, then that tends to kind of reassert itself elsewhere. And I think, you know, you do see that all the time, of course. And maybe that's also true of the classical tradition.

You know, the more there is a kind of, even if it's a sort of unconscious recognition that music has this kind of, you know, affective qualities, if you like, you know, which does subverts something of this transcendent hierarchical structure, then the more that transcendent hierarchical structure tends to reassert itself in turn. And, you know, if that is, I mean, if that kind of analysis is at all correct, then that's, you know, that's quite a sort of positive way of looking at it, I would say, because at least then you could, you can kind of see a system happening and you can exactly see where to intervene in it to have an impact and to further encourage the tendencies

that do tend to undermine that kind of centralised control. But as I said before, I do think even at the teenage pop level of music, I think it's really fantastic and fascinating that you get kids, as I'm sure we've all done, you know that there is something ineffable about your favorite pop song, you know, and that's why you play it over and over and over again. Everybody's had one that they, you know, played 200 times, and even that's not enough to kind of have it, is it? You can't have it. So you buy the posters, and of course now, you know, more and more, there's the Twitter feeds, there's subscribe to the Facebook pages, you know. There's all of this stuff that you try to, you know, express this desire to kind of own it, have it, see it,

put it on the wall, don't you think? and reproduce it and buy and sell it as well which is of course another issue about ownership on a more economic side Do we also have any questions? Just a small comment really but thank you so much for your talks and Susanna thank you for a very encouraging demonstration because sometimes I despair when I see a lot of guys explaining stuff and fetishizing the technology rather than actually talking about

what they're actually creating and I actually just came away from the other talk it was a lot of guys I'm sorry to centralize here but I found this really encouraging so thank you yeah and that's really my point I mean you know the offensive technology that has the potential to break down hierarchies at the same time is being fetishised by exactly those who feel in some ways potentially undermined by it and I actually run a course in music production and I have certain years that there's no girls at all in the groups and whatever I would do about it, it's whoever comes to the course.

So there's a lot of wanting to engage with the technology rather than wanting to engage with what's actually the outcome or the political potential of the outcomes that initially seems to engage a lot of those new students. So I have no easy answers for that. again, but I just wanted to sort of highlight that, that although we have, you know, all these high hopes about potential, that there's also this grabbing back. So I think actually seeing something demonstrated about how the creative process actually evolves, I think is very encouraging. Thank you. You both alluded to this kind of tension on the one hand,

kind of what feel like quite kind of subversive radical impulses and they seem to be met by reassertions of tradition and conservatism on the other side but probably it's also important to think that that in itself is a lot goes a long way to explaining much of the history of technology, it is how the technologies that we've got have arisen anyway if you look at the well as I said with you know, early cybernetics, it's so much about conservatism, and then, you know, a kind of radical way of thinking about it comes in, then you have a further, you know, clampdown of conservatism, and so it goes, you know, but this is often the way in which things do, in fact, move forwards, you know,

so having a battle over these things is not necessarily a bad thing at all, you know, it's often the way in which things do shift. Yeah, and just one last minute, But it's also the way we talk about our histories. So there's a lot of excription of women, you know, continuously. So the one person actually said that you didn't mention was Daphne Oram, who's a big experimentalist in electronic music, not as a woman, but as a producer and as an experimentalist, you know, at the very early stages of electronic music. I mean on that point there are she is obviously a great example there were many in fact an amazing number

a very prominent female there is an article in the Vesual magazine listing 101 female it's a big story but I would say it is interesting what one does about this perennial problem of these kind of lost women or lost whoever in history to my way of thinking of course obviously they should be in the story, it's a crime that they're not, so of course they should be there. But better is to introduce them in a way which does actually do something to the narrative itself. You know, I think there is a real risk that you've got this nice narrative, and often that in itself is very linear, and it goes from A to B, and pioneer to pioneer, and individual to individual, and you notice that there's some missing women, so we pop them in, and then it's all even more complete, you know, and actually what are we doing then? You know, getting even more of a nice ordered narrative

that we can all agree is a stable account of history. Well, no, we don't want... Well, I presume, you know, collectively, that's not the only desirable thing, let's say. We don't want that. And, you know, I think what's great is to put these women on the map, but change the map in doing so. Yeah, I think this ties in also very interestingly with what Fender was saying about the use of language, so the kind of these structural issues which have caused these huge discrepancies that we can see in the facts, in the numbers, in representation, for example, of women in electronic music. But I think there's a deep sense that many of these issues are almost invisible or slightly intangible.

A topic that came up yesterday in our discussion in our little chat was this idea that music has all these potentialities and all these possibilities, but somehow manages to still be so conservative, even in something that is meant to be experimental, music edgy, kind of avant-garde, but tends to still be dominated by able-bodied white men from the middle class. So I think it's also about trying to find these positions where we are also all kind of going in a certain direction, structural issues, which we were not so aware of. I also wonder, you know, I mean, of course I realise if you, you know, are working in a more professional capacity,

you know, in music theory or in, you know, in the field, so to speak, it perhaps looks very different. But actually, I wonder how true it really is that, you know, it is all still so conservative. I mean, I do appreciate if you look at the figures and so on, it looks pretty depressing. but I would say though that probably 20 years ago it probably looked even more depressing I think now the notion that you can sit on the panel with discuss sound engineering and music production and even globally as well actually to look at the music that people do actually listen to or hesitate to use these cliches about

stuff kids make in their bedrooms and what's on the streets. But you know what I mean. There is a big world, a big sonic world out there, isn't there? And I would think it has actually really opened up and become a lot more interesting in the last 20 years, not least through the easy availability of this technology. I don't think it has just stayed the same. Has it been too... Maybe I am being just too naive. Is there optimism? I completely agree with you, Sadie. And I have evidence too. I mean, not the complete overview, but through the, I mean, female pressure has been existing for 15 years and we have a mailing list and the numbers of postings on the mailing list about new own productions and new own releases and concerts and electronic music has dramatically increased.

And another thing that has dramatically increased is the numbers of female artists I know of, and a lot of other people know of as well. I mean, the depressing numbers is the representation of these female artists on festivals, for example, or on label rosters, for example. But the overall tendency of the productivity is not depressive at all. at all. I mean, it's still like behind the boys, but it's increasing and it's exponentially increasing, I think. It'd be interesting to see some statistics about the percentage of the kind of women festival directors or something like this, rather than only looking at the participants.

Is there any more questions from the audience before we wrap things up? One over here. Thank you very much for the really interesting talks. I think that the last point about that you mentioned of able-bodied, white, middle-class guys doing this music is something that occurred to me in the 80s when I was studying at college. We had this, we used very early samplers, we used very early Macintosh, Atari STs, and the discourse then was, well, what's happening to acuzmatic music? Why isn't it famous anymore? And the reason is because there is definitely this idea of the middle class and working class, and this debate actually opens up, or what your comments just then, actually open up the debate about class issues and those responses to music. And so my answer to that question, which was posed then about acuzmatic music,

is that, well, other people from other stratas of society have taken the same technology and they were creating rave, they were creating jungle, drum and bass, hip-hop. The issue still remains, however, that it is predominantly, or at least was then, and through my experience also of years of DJing, it's very painful to, and I share your points about music making, you do it because you love it. It doesn't mean to say you're not being political in the choices you make. And going to all these kind of record shops, Black Market and Fonica in London, and the painful experience of just seeing a row of guys with a girlfriend standing in the back waiting. And you have no idea what the true identity of these producers are and what the role of women in that technology is that everyone is dancing to. So those issues are still there, but I think the issue of technology and its availability to different cultural strata, I think, does actually open up this debate.

There is still a lot to do, and I think, okay, perhaps it's encouraging to see how avant-garde music can be, but I also agree with the last speaker's point about the transgender and transfeminism, that a lot of this music that is supposed to be avant-garde isn't, because we keep on saying it's avant-garde, and then you just close yourself off, because you don't challenge it anymore, and it needs to be as radical as the promise of the technology that it opens up for everyone, and it's not. And so I kind of agree with that. We need to be kind of searching for these radical things at all levels of the music. So thank you for the very inspiring ideas. It's true, I think. Thank you for this comment. Do you want to all maybe give a quick closing remark? Maybe answering the question,

can we be optimistic about the situation? Yeah, I mean, I think in terms of, you know, if you think of just, you know, what kind of messages and images girls see as they're growing up at the moment, I must say, I do think there are some really very pessimistic signs. And this point about, you know, on the one hand, things become so much more radical and full of potential, and on the other hand, you know, the old structures reassert themselves, I think you really can see that at the moment with this kind of flood of, you know, celebrity, performer, manufactured female artistes, you know,

many of whom I think do an incredible amount of damage to how girls think of themselves, what they think is possible in life and undoubtedly what they think they can do in terms of making music. Because if you grow up on a diet of Miley Cyrus with the wrecking ball, then I think that's the depressing, that's the conservatism of music reasserting itself, to my mind, this heavily visualized and... Yeah, very... Well, I won't go on. You know what I mean. I think that, I see, in terms of the broad culture, I think that's the negative side. yeah um i think i think uh the point about kind of uh the class dimensions and and and kind of

racial dimensions of this stuff as well it's really important and it kind of points to me um of kind of perhaps one of the the most difficult things to deal with for me kind of these issues about um the role of women in music making the relationship between women and sound and the issues of class as well are kind of bound up with a broader kind of structural problem. So in many ways, I kind of feel that, you know, on one hand, I think it's right to give music a hard time and it's right to say, you know, why have we still got these problems? But ultimately, like, it's symptomatic of a broader issue. And I think that it doesn't take too long of picking at some of these issues where you actually do have to talk about not just kind of musical culture, but kind of a bigger picture. And I think it's important not to lose sight of that.

So when people kind of get grumpy and like, oh, why are you just having a go at like, why are you just talking about this kind of gender stuff in music? It's just music. Leave it alone. It's like, well, actually, you know, it's pointing to something more fundamental and more important. And, you know, we're not going to be able to resolve these issues without resolving some of the bigger issues as well. And, you know, unfortunately, I don't think those things are going to have an easy or kind of gentle or kind of quick resolution either. so I think not losing sight of the fact that this is actually embedded within a broader kind of issues of social production and kind of political economic tensions is really important yeah thanks for making that point Susanna and Fender is there hope?

well if there wasn't hope if I wouldn't be optimistic I think I would not be alive but to put it very drastically. No, seriously, of course music and electronic music and club culture is not like a separate planet and it reflects society issues. That's clear. What I realized last year with all the media attention we got after this press statement we made and the so-called study, the numbers, is that obviously a large part of society here in Europe

or in Western industrialized countries is supporting the idea of a balanced gender situation in the society. And this support and this attention means at the same time that we are not there yet. And of course we have to work on it. And I think it can be very enriching. Of course it means that some people maybe have a little less work to do and a little less income because like the whole pie has to be shared, more just, how do you say it?

More just. more fair and that means some people have to get a little bit less and others have to get a little bit more this is not easy this will not work without any sort of irritations or whatever of course I think there is hope I think we are in the right way it's going slow but it's going I think everything was set. Well, I was thinking of the whole time now, what about hope and service and anything?

As I come from life sound, life sound is really something that is absolutely momentary and volatile. I don't know if there's hope or a pattern. and so I think it's interesting how everything developed for women and all other bodies in the last 20 years with cyber-semination and so we will talk about what concepts what the changes and what the next is

Thank you so much for coming.