Gendered Voices and Social Harmony
Editor’s Note: Our forum on gender and voice comes to a close today—and what a forum it has been! Last week AO Roberts talked about speech synthesis and why the robotic voices are so often female. That post followed Art Blake’s, where he talked about how his experience shifting his voice from feminine to masculine as a transgender man intersects with his work on John Cage. Before that, Regina Bradley put the soundtrack of Scandal in conversation with race and gender. The week before I talked about what it meant to have people call me, a woman of color, “loud.” The post that started it all? Christine Ehrick‘s selections from her forthcoming book, on the gendered soundscape.
This week Robin James returns to SO! to round out our forum with an analysis of how ideas of what women should sound like have roots in Greek philosophy. So, lean in, close your eyes, and let the voices take you back in time. –Liana M. Silva, Managing Editor
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Dove and Twitter’s #SpeakBeautiful tries to market its brand by getting Twitter users to rally behind the hashtag. The idea is to encourage women to talk about their bodies and other women’s bodies only in positive terms–and to encourage interaction on Twitter. But why is tweeting, which is entirely text-based, called “speaking”? And what does it mean to speak beautifully, since beauty is usually an issue of body image? In other words, why give this campaign that specific name?
Their promotional video has a clue. As on Twitter, there is no voice, only text; however, there is an instrumental soundtrack throughout. It begins in a minor mode, traditionally associated with negative emotions. Then, around the 0:19 mark, once the blue Dove domino has started knocking down all the white dominoes with negative comments printed on them, the soundtrack shifts to major mode, which is traditionally associated with positive emotions. The video equates social media performance with musical harmony: negative comments are dissonant, positive ones are consonant.
“Speaking beautifully” means adopting the tone or attunement expected of the social media performance. But this still doesn’t tell us why it makes sense for Dove to describe women’s ability to follow social (media) norms as speaking, as making a particular kind of sound. #SpeakBeautiful is just the latest example of a convention that dates back thousands of years: patriarchy moderates women’s literal and metaphoric voices to control their participation in and affect on society, ensuring that these voices don’t disrupt a so-called harmoniously-ordered society. In what follows, I look to the origin of that convention in so we can better understand how it works today.
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Anne Carson’s essay “The Gender of Sound” focuses mainly on ancient Greek literature and philosophy. “In general,” she argues, “the women of classical literature are a species given to disorderly and uncontrolled outflow of sound” (126). Unless carefully managed by husbands and the law, women’s loose lips (in both senses of the term) will upset overall “harmonious” order of the city. That’s why the ancient Greeks thought women’s disharmonious sounds acted “as political disease” (127).
“Eglise de Commana2012 469” by Lamiot – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Emphasizing the relationship the Greeks drew between sonic harmony and social harmony, Carson’s analysis hinges on the concept of sophrosyne; often translated as “moderation,” the ancient Greeks understood sophrosyne as a type of harmony, and often explicitly connected it to musical harmony. Understanding the connection between sophrosyne and ancient Greek theories of musical harmony (which are very different than contemporary European ones) makes it easy to update Carson’s analysis to account for contemporary appraisals of women’s voices, such as the view that some feminist voices on social media are “toxic.”
According to Carson, the ancient Greeks thought women’s voices were immoderate when they exhibited excessive frequency: they could talk either at too high a pitch, or just talk too much. As Carson explains,
verbal continence is an essential feature of the masculine virtue of sophrosyne…[A]ncient discussions of the virtue of sophrosyne demonstrate clearly that, where it is applied to women, this word has a different definition than for men. Female sophrosyne is coextensive with female obedience to male direction and rarely means more than chastity. When it does mean more, the allusion is often to sound. A husband exhorting his wife or concubine to sophrosyne is likely to mean ‘Be quiet!’ (126).
So, (certain kinds of) men were thought to be capable of embodying (masculine) sophrosyne, that is, of comporting their bodies in accord with the order of the city, so that when they did speak, their speech contributed to social harmony and orderliness. The practice of sophrosyne aligns one’s body with the logos of a properly-ordered society, and, indeed, a properly-ordered cosmos. As Judith Periano puts it, moderation “tunes the soul to the cosmic scale (rather than the physical body)” (33). Women (and slaves, and some other kinds of men) were thought to be incapable of embodying this logos, of transforming their bodies into microcosms of the well-ordered city and harmonious cosmos. Their speech would disrupt social and cosmic harmony with dissonant, disorganized material. Silence, then, is how women contributed to social and cosmic harmony: their verbal and sexual chastity preserved the optimal, most well-balanced political and metaphysical order.
“Sanzio 01 Plato Aristotle” by Raphael – Web Gallery of Art: Image Info about artwork. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Women couldn’t embody the logos because they had “the wrong kind of flesh and the wrong alignment of pores for the production of low vocal pitches, no matter how hard they exercised” (Carson 120). Women’s disproportional “alignment of pores” matters, and Ancient Greek music theory is key to understanding why. Though there was widespread disagreement as to the specific ratios that were the most consonant and harmonious, there was a general consensus among music theorists and philosophers that musical harmony was a matter of geometric proportion. For example, Plato says in Timaeus 32c that the cosmos “was harmonized by proportion.” Proportion, for the ancient Greeks is both a ratio and a hierarchical ordering, a relational distribution that is also a series. Plato’s myth of the metals, for example, is both proportional (the “gold” get the most responsibility) and hierarchical (the gold are on the top). There is a right place for everything, and harmony is the effect of everything being in its right, appropriately proportionate place.
Harmonious sounds are side-effects of harmoniously proportioned material bodies–or rather, sonic harmony occurs when the relationship between an instrument’s internal structure and external emission (e.g., between body and speech) is itself proportionate. For example, on a pipe organ, a pipe’s size is directly and consistently proportional to the pitch it emits, such that the geometric relationships among pipes are directly and consistently proportional to the relationships among pitches. Woodwinds, on the other hand, exhibit no such direct, consistent relationship between material configuration and emitted pitch. On an oboe, the geometric relationship between the instrument as it plays a middle C and a high C does not mirror to the acoustic relationship between those pitches. As Plato puts it “in the case of flute-playing, the harmonies are found not by measurement but by the hit and miss of training, and quite generally music tries to find the measure by observing vibrating strings. So there is a lot of imprecision mixed up in it and very little reliability” (Philebus 56a). Here, he expresses the then-typical view that musical harmony ought to be a mathematically consistent effect of geometric relationships among the instrument’s parts (e.g., vibrating strings). The problem with the flute is that the relationships among its pitches is merely sonic, and cannot be inferred from the geometric relationships among its parts. Its sounds do not exhibit a consistent, proportional, moderate relationship to its material structure.
This is the same problem Carson identifies with women: the orderliness of their vocal emissions cannot be reliably inferred from the visible arrangement of their body and its constitutent parts. Like the flute, a feminine body cannot emit a moderate sound because the proportions of women’s bodies are out of whack; they don’t exhibit the proper ratio between parts, or between inner constitution and outer expression.
“Banquet Euaion Louvre G467 n2” by English: Euaion Painter – Jastrow (2008). Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Women’s voices are “bad to hear or make men uncomfortable” (Carson, 129) not just because the voices themselves are disharmoniously feminine, but because they upset the social and cosmic order, specifically, the balance between inside and outside (129), intelligible and visible. Just as the aulos (an ancient Greek double-reeded instrument, somewhat like a modern oboe) upsets the proper, ideal relationship between an instrument’s physical structure (the part that commands, the mathematical logos of proportionality) and acoustic tuning (the part that obeys, pitches), women’s emissions mess up the proper, logical relationship between “the part that commands and the part that obeys” (Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 2, 87), that is, between inner and outer, soul and body, private and public. Carson says, “By projections and leakages of all kinds–somatic, vocal, emotional, sexual–females expose or expend what should be kept in” (129). Sophrosyne is what keeps things in their right place as they get outwardly expressed.
When men practice “masculine” sophrosyne, they shape their bodies, their resonating innards, so to speak, into a form that will lend itself to rational, proportional outer expression, i.e., speech. Women’s feminine sophrosyne, public silence, keeps their irrational bodies from outwardly expressing disharmonious, disproportionate phenomena that would knock everything out of balance. Masculine sophrosyne is a technique for embodying the logos at the individual, social, and cosmic levels; feminine sophrosyne is a technique for keeping the cosmic/social logos from being disturbed.
Nowadays, though, we don’t expect “good” women to be seen and not heard–we praise (some) women for making the right noises in the right contexts. For example, Rebecca Solnit wrote that 2014 was, for women, “a year of mounting refusal to be silent…It was loud, discordant, and maybe transformative, because important things were said…and heard as never before.” Proclamations of women’s envoicement–of women’s full inclusion and participation in society–are central to post-feminist patriarchy, which functions best when there is a little bit of “feminist” noise mixed in with its signal. The audibility of some women’s “feminist” voices serves as (misleading) evidence that patriarchy is over (or on the way there), and lets patriarchy and the intersectional work it does pass unnoticed. Whereas the ancient Greeks thought women’s voices were absent from a harmonious society, contemporary (neo)liberal democracies think a harmonious society includes a certain amount of feminist noise.
“Christine de Pisan – cathedra” by From compendium of Christine de Pizan’s works, 1413. Produced in her scriptorium in Paris – http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/winter_2010/endnotes/an-educated-lady.html. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
But not too much feminist noise: feminist noise must be moderate. Moderation still matters–it’s just measured differently than it was in ancient Greece. It isn’t a matter of geometric proportion, but of dynamic range. From a post-feminist perspective, feminist voices that call attention to ongoing patriarchy and misogyny feel too loud. Sara Ahmed explains, “words like “racism” and “sexism” are heard as abrasive because they name what has receded from view.” Voices that speak of ongoing racism and sexism are charged with the same flaws attributed to artificially loudened, overcompressed music: inflexibility, lack of variability, and ineffectiveness. Just as overcompressed music is thought to, as Suhas Sreedhar describes “sacrifice…the natural ebb and flow of music,” feminist activists are thought to to sacrifice the natural ebb and flow of social harmony.
In a post-feminist, post-race society, people who continually insist on the existence of sexism and racism appear to be similarly stuck on an irrelevant issue and lacking in expressive range. Similarly, in music lacking dynamic range, “the sound becomes analogous to someone constantly shouting everything he or she says. Not only is all impact lost, but the constant level of the sound is fatiguing to the ear (Sreedhar).” Because it stays more or less fixed at the same amplitude of sound, loud music is thought to be both ineffective and unhealthy for those subjected to it. Similarly, liberal critics of women of color activists often characterize them as hostile, uncivil, or overly aggressive in tone, which supposedly diminishes the impact of their work and both upsets the healthy process of social change and fatigues the public. They are, in Michelle Goldberg’s terms, “toxic.”
This “ebb and flow” is not a geometric proportion, but a frequency or statistical distribution that can be represented as a sine wave. As I have argued here, contemporary concepts of social harmony aren’t based in ancient Greek music theory, but on acoustics. For example, Alex Pentland’s theory of “social physics” or, “the reliable, mathematical connections between information and idea flow…and people’s behavior” (2), treats individual and group behavior as predictable patterns that emerge, as signal, from noisy data streams, just as harmonics and partials emerge from interacting sound frequencies.
In this context, “loud” feminist voices feel like they’re upsetting the ebb and flow, the dynamic range and variability, of information and idea flow. But the thing is, they aren’t upsetting the flow, but intensifying it: their perceived loudness incites others to respond with trolling, harassing, and other kinds of policing speech, often in massive scale. When philosopher Cheryl Abbate told her students that it was unacceptable to express homophobic views in class, John McAdams, a tenured faculty member in the department where Abbate is a doctoral student, wrote a blog post accusing her of inhibiting the free expression of a diverse range of opinions. Her “loud” feminism masked the “healthy diversity” of opinions. McAdams’s post led Abbate to be targeted by a tsunami of harassment, from individuals emailing her, to social media attacks, to attacks from mainstream media and political organizations. When feminist voices make noise, patriarchy amps up its own frequencies to bring the mix back in proper balance so that patriarchy is what emerges from feminist noise. In this context, voices are harmonious when, together, their ebb and flow predictably transmits patriarchal signal into the future. Sophrosyne is a feature of voices that interact so that patriarchal power relations emerge from them: they might actually have an extremely high volume, but they feel moderate because they restore the “normal” ebb and flow of society.
When Dove and Twitter urge women to “speak beautifully,” they’re really demanding that women practice sophrosyne: that they make just enough ‘feminist’ noise without being too loud–i.e., loud enough to distort the brand image of Unilever and Twitter. So, even though ancient Greek concepts of musical harmony and patriarchy are vastly different than contemporary (neo)liberal democratic ones, each era uses its own version of sophrosyne to shape women’s voices into something consonant with a social order that privileges men and masculinity.
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Featured image: “” by Flickr user Ed Lynch-Bell, CC BY-NC 2.0
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Robin James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte. She is author of two books: Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, and neoliberalism, published by Zer0 books last year, and The Conjectural Body: gender, race and the philosophy of music was published by Lexington Books in 2010. Her work on feminism, race, contemporary continental philosophy, pop music, and sound studies has appeared in The New Inquiry, Hypatia, differences, Contemporary Aesthetics, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is also a digital sound artist and musician. She blogs at its-her-factory.com and is a regular contributor to Cyborgology.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, check out:
Top 40 Democracy: Taylor Swift’s Election Day Victory—Eric Weisbard
Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape: At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Sound Studies—Christine Ehrick
On Sound and Pleasure: Meditations on the Human Voice– Yvon Bonefant
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Echo and the Chorus of Female Machines
Editor’s Note: February may be over, but our forum is still on! Today I bring you installment #5 of Sounding Out!‘s blog forum on gender and voice. Last week Art Blake talked about how his experience shifting his voice from feminine to masculine as a transgender man intersects with his work on John Cage. Before that, Regina Bradley put the soundtrack of Scandal in conversation with race and gender. The week before I talked about what it meant to have people call me, a woman of color, “loud.” That post was preceded by Christine Ehrick‘s selections from her forthcoming book, on the gendered soundscape. We have one more left! Robin James will round out our forum with an analysis of how ideas of what women should sound like have roots in Greek philosophy.
This week Canadian artist and writer AO Roberts takes us into the arena of speech synthesis and makes us wonder about what it means that the voices are so often female. So, lean in, close your eyes, and don’t be afraid of the robots’ voices. –Liana M. Silva, Managing Editor
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I used Apple’s SIRI for the first time on an iPhone 4S. After hundreds of miles in a van full of people on a cross-country tour, all of the music had been played and the comedy mp3s entirely depleted. So, like so many first time SIRI users, we killed time by asking questions that went from the obscure to the absurd. Passive, awaiting command, prone to glitches: there was something both comedic and insidious about SIRI as female-gendered program, something that seemed to bind up the technology with stereotypical ideas of femininity.
“Maria the Maschinenmensch” by Flickr user Timothy Rose, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Speech synthesis is the artificial simulation of the human voice through hardware or software, and SIRI is but one incarnation of the historical chorus of machines speaking what we code to be female. Starting from the early 20th century Voder, to the Cold-War era Silvia and Audrey, up to Amazon’s newly released Echo, researchers have by and large developed these applications as female personae. Each program articulates an individual timbre and character, soothing soft spoken or matter of fact; this is your mother, sister, or lover, here to affirm your interests while reminding you about that missed birthday. She is easy to call up in memory, tones rounded at the edges, like Scarlett Johansson’s smoky conviviality as Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her, a bodiless purr. Simulated speech articulates a series of assumptions about what neutral articulation is, what a female voice is, and whose voice technology can ventriloquize.
The ways computers hear and speak the human voice are as complex as they are rapidly expanding. But in robotics gender is charted down to actual wavelength, actively policed around 100-150 HZ (male) and 200-250 HZ (female). Now prevalent in entertainment, navigation, law enforcement, surveillance, security, and communications, speech synthesis and recognition hold up an acoustic mirror to the dominant cultures from which they materialize. While they might provide useful tools for everything from time management to self-improvement, they also reinforce cisheteronormative definitions of personhood. Like the binary code that now gives it form, the development of speech recognition separated the entire spectrum of vocal expression into rigid biologically based categories. Ideas of a real voice vs. fake voice, in all their resonances with passing or failing one’s gender performance, have through this process been designed into the technology itself.
A SERIES OF MISERABLE GRUNTS
“Kempelen Speakingmachine” by Fabian Brackhane (Quintatoen), Saarbrücken – Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons –
The first voice to be synthesized was a reed and bellows box invented by Wolfgang Von Kempelen in 1791 and shown off in the courts of the Hapsburg Empire. Von Kempelen had gained renown for his chess-playing Turk, a racist cartoon of an automaton that made waves amongst the nobles until it was revealed that underneath the tabletop was a small man secretly moving the chess player’s limbs. Von Kempelen’s second work, the speaking machine, wowed its audiences thoroughly. The player wheedled and squeezed the contraption, pushing air through its reed larynx to replicate simple words like mama and papa.
Synthesizing the voice has always required some level of making strange, of phonemic abstraction. Bell Laboratories originally developed The Voder, the earliest incarnation of the vocoder, as a cryptographic device for WWII military communications. The machine split the human voice into a spectral representation, fragmenting the source into number of different frequencies that were then recombined into synthetic speech. Noise and unintelligibility shielded the Allies’ phone calls from Nazi interception. The Vocoder’s developer, Ralph Miller, bemoaned the atrocities the machine performed on language, reducing it to a “series of miserable grunts.”
From website Binary Heap-
In his history of the The Vocoder, How to Wreck a Nice Beach, Dave Tompkins tells how the apparatus originally took up an entire wall and was played solely by female phone operators, but the pitch of the female voice was said to be too high to be heard by the nascent technology. In fact, when it debuted at the 1939 World’s Fair, only men were chosen to experience the roboticization of their voice. The Voder was, in fact, originally created to only hear pitches in the range of 100-150 HZ, a designed exclusion from the start. So when the Signal Corps of the Army convinced President Eisenhower to call his wife via Voder from North Africa, Miller and the developers panicked for fear she wouldn’t be heard. Entering the Pentagon late at night, Mamie Eisenhower spoke into the telephone and a fragmented version of her words travelled across the Atlantic. Resurfacing in angular vocoded form, her voice urged her husband to come home, and he had no problem hearing her. Instead of giving the developers pause to question their own definitions of gender, this interaction is told as a derisive footnote of in the history of the sound and technology: the punchline being that the first lady’s voice was heard because it was as low as a man’s.
WAKE WORDS
Screen shot of Amazon’s page for Echo
In fall 2014 Amazon launched Echo, their new personal assistant device. Echo is a 12-inch long plain black cone that stands upright on a tabletop, similar in appearance to a telephoto camera lens. Equipped with far field mics, Echo has a female voice, connected to the cloud and always on standby. Users engage Echo with their own chosen ‘wake’ word. The linguistic similarity to a BDSM safe word could have been lost on developers. Although here inverted, the word is used to engage rather than halt action, awakening an instrument that lays dormant awaiting command.
Amazon’s much-parodied promotional video for Echo is narrated by the innocent voice of the youngest daughter in a happy, straight, white, middle-class family. While the son pitches Oedipal jabs at the father for his dubious role as patriarchal translator of technology, each member of the family soon discovers the ways Echo is useful to them. They name it Alexa and move from questions like: “Alexa how many teaspoons in a tablespoon” and “How tall is Mt. Everest?” to commands for dance mixes and cute jokes. Echo enacts a hybrid role as mother, surrogate companion, and nanny of sorts not through any real aspects of labor but through the intangible contribution of information. As a female-voiced oracle in the early pantheon of the Internet of Things, Echo’s use value is squarely placed in the realm of cisheteronormative domestic knowledge production. Gone are the tongue-in-cheek existential questions proffered to SIRI upon its release. The future with Echo is clean, wholesome, and absolutely SFW. But what does it mean for Echo to be accepted into the home, as a female gendered speaking subject?
Concerns over privacy and surveillance quickly followed Echo’s release, alarms mostly sounding over its “always on” function. Amazon banks on the safety and intimacy we culturally associate with the female voice to ease the transition of robots and AI into the home. If the promotional video painted an accurate picture of Echo’s usage, it would appear that Amazon had successfully launched Echo as a bodiless voice over the uncanny valley, the chasm below littered with broken phalanxes of female machines. Masahiro Mori coined the now familiar term uncanny valley in 1970 to describe the dip in empathic response to humanoid robots as they approach realism.
If we listen to the litany of reactions to robot voices through the filters of gender and sexuality it reveals the stark inclines of what we might think of as a queer uncanny valley. Paulina Palmer wrote in The Queer Uncanny about reoccurring tropes in queer film and literature, expanding upon what Freud saw as a prototypical aspect of the uncanny: the doubling and interchanging of the self. In the queer uncanny we see another kind of rift: that between signifier and signified embodied by trans people, the tearing apart of gender from its biological basis. The non-linear algebra of difference posed by queer and trans bodies is akin to the blurring of divisions between human and machine represented by the cyborg. This is the coupling of transphobic and automatonophobic anxieties, defined always in relation to the responses and preoccupations of a white, able bodied, cisgendered male norm. This is the queer uncanny valley. For the synthesized voice to function here, it must ease the chasm, like Echo: sutured by a voice coded as neutral, but premised upon the imagined body of a white, heterosexual, educated middle class woman.
22% Female
My own voice spans a range that would have dismayed someone like Ralph Miller. I sang tenor in Junior High choir until I was found out for straying, and then warned to stay properly in the realms of alto, but preferably soprano range. Around the same time I saw a late night feature of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, struggling to lose her crass proletariat inflection. So I, a working class gender ambivalent kid, walked around with books on my head muttering The Rain In Spain Falls Mainly on the Plain for weeks after. I’m generally loud, opinionated and people remember me for my laugh. I have sung in doom metal and grindcore punk bands, using both screeching highs and the growling “cookie monster” vocal technique mostly employed by cismales.
Given my own history of toying with and estrangement from what my voice is supposed to sound like, I was interested to try out a new app on the market, the Exceptional Voice App (EVA ), touted as “The World’s First and Only Transgender Voice Training App.” Functioning as a speech recognition program, EVA analyzes the pitch, respiration, and character of your voice with the stated goal of providing training to sound more like one’s authentic self. Behind EVA is Kathe Perez, a speech pathologist and businesswoman, the developer and provider of code to the circuit. And behind the code is the promise of giving proper form to rough sounds, pitch-perfect prosody, safety, acceptance, and wholeness. Informational and training videos are integrated with tonal mimicry for phrases like hee, haa, and ooh. User progress is rated and logged with options to share goals reached on Twitter and Facebook. Customers can buy EVA for Gals or EVA for Guys. I purchased the app online for my iPhone for $5.97.
My initial EVA training scores informed me I was 22% female; a recurring number I receive in interfaces with identity recognition software. Facial recognition programs consistently rate my face at 22% female. If I smile I tend to get a higher female response than my neutral face, coded and read as male. Technology is caught up in these translations of gender: we socialize women to smile more than men, then write code for machines to recognize a woman in a face that smiles.
As for EVA’s usage, it seems to be a helpful pedagogical tool with more people sharing their positive results and reviews on trans forums every day. With violence against trans people persisting—even increasing—at alarming rates, experienced worst by trans women of color, the way one’s voice is heard and perceived is a real issue of safety. Programs like EVA can be employed to increase ease of mobility throughout the world. However, EVA is also out of reach to many, a classed capitalist venture that tautologically defines and creates users with supply. The context for EVA is the systems of legal, medical, and scientific categories inherited from Foucault’s era of discipline; the predetermined hallucination of normal sexuality, the invention of biological criteria to define the sexes and the pathologization of those outside each box, controlled by systems of biopower.
Despite all these tools we’ll never really know how we sound. It is true that the resonant chamber of our own skull provides us with a different acoustic image of our own voice. We hate to hear our voice recorded because suddenly we catch a sonic glimpse of what other people hear: sharper more angular tones, higher pitch, less warmth. Speech recognition and synthesis work upon the same logic, the shifting away from interiority; a just off the mark approximation. So the question remains what would a gender variant voice synthesis and recognition sound like? How much is reliant upon the technology and how much depends upon individual listeners, their culture, and what they project upon the voice? As markets grow, so too have more internationally accented English dialects been added to computer programs with voice synthesis. Thai, Indian, Arabic and Eastern European English were added to Mac OSX Lion in 2011. Can we hope to soon offer our voices to the industry not as a set of data to be mined into caricatures, but as a way to assist in the opening up in gender definitions? We would be better served to resist the urge to chime in and listen to the field in the same way we suddenly hear our recorded voice played back, with a focus on the sour notes of cold translation.
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Featured image: “Golden People love Gold Jewelry Robots” by Flickr user epSos.de, CC BY 2.0
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AO Roberts is a Canadian intermedia artist and writer based in Oakland whose work explores gender, technology and embodiment through sound, installation and print. A founding member of Winnipeg’s NGTVSPC feminist artist collective, they have shown their work at galleries and festivals internationally. They have also destroyed their vocal chords, played bass and made terrible sounds in a long line of noise projects and grindcore bands, including VOR, Hoover Death, Kursk and Wolbachia. They hold a BFA from the University of Manitoba and a MFA in Sculpture from California College of the Arts.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Hearing Queerly: NBC’s “The Voice”—Karen Tongson
On Sound and Pleasure: Meditations on the Human Voice—Yvon Bonefant
I Been On: BaddieBey and Beyoncé’s Sonic Masculinity—Regina Bradley
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