Month: February 2013

I would like to contribute to the Her Noise Archive by introducing topics from the field of trans studies and activism on the intersections of sound art and sound engineering.

In electronic and electroacoustic music, the process of recording music or to amplify the sources coming from the stage in a concert situation is something I regard as an artistic process. Sound engineers who differ from the norm of the white cis male mixer are rare. From my own experience of working with all-female or queer bands, I have the perception that as a live sound engineer I have always been treated as a member of the band equally with the musicians on stage. Also being a musician and band member myself, I discovered and understood the mixing console and the P.A. system as a musical instrument. Live Sound engineering is often or traditionally perceived as a technical supplement, which assists the band or the orchestra but which is not rendered as a musical agent by itself. The reasons also rest on the historical position of the sound engineer who is treated as the controller of the sound rather than as the co-producer of a collective sound production. My ideas on sound engineering, especially on Live Sound are driven by my practice as a musician and engineer combined with my position of being a transgender identified person.

The Shaggs may not be one of the first examples that come to mind when thinking of notable female sound practitioners and role models for women in the sound arts. They are often not taken seriously: their music’s “ineptitude” something to marvel and laugh at – “so bad it’s good”, a joke listeners and collectors of their music are in on but the band themselves are not.

From the Her Noise Archive, I have chosen Frances Dyson’s book, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in Arts and Culture. Though not the central focus of her book, she addresses two things that have always intrigued me about sound; that it provokes a listening experience that is ontologically profound and that it is married to space, to corporeality while not needing to adhere to realism at all. Through a discussion of this and other characteristics of New Media Art, Dyson discusses the various ways in which we experience it.