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The Gender of Sound
Abstract
The groundbreaking Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum; September 2004; paperback original) maps the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard music today. Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, Audio Culture traces the genealogy of current musical practices and theoretical concerns, drawing lines of connection between recent musical production and earlier moments of sonic experimentation. It aims to foreground the various rewirings of musical composition and performance that have taken place in the past few decades and to provide a critical and theoretical language for this new audio culture.
This new and expanded edition of the Audio Culture contains twenty-five additional essays, including four newly-commissioned pieces. Taken as a whole, the book explores the interconnections among such forms as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrète, free improvisation, experimental music, avant-rock, dub reggae, ambient music, hip hop, and techno via writings by philosophers, cultural theorists, and composers. Instead of focusing on some “crossover” between “high art” and “popular culture,” Audio Culture takes all these musics as experimental practices on par with, and linked to, one another. While cultural studies has tended to look at music (primarily popular music) from a sociological perspective, the concern here is philosophical, musical, and historical.
Audio Culture includes writing by some of the most important musical thinkers of the past half-century, among them John Cage, Brian Eno, Ornette Coleman, Pauline Oliveros, Maryanne Amacher, Glenn Gould, Umberto Eco, Jacques Attali, Simon Reynolds, Eliane Radigue, David Toop, John Zorn, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. Each essay has its own short introduction, helping the reader to place the essay within musical, historical, and conceptual contexts, and the volume concludes with a glossary, a timeline, and an extensive discography.
“Rouse the Ruse and the Rush” is a long poetic sequence the author composed between 2020 and 2021, amidst various waves of COVID-19 outbreaks and the acceleration of “pro-life” efforts in the United States to restrict access to abortions at local levels and, ultimately, to overturn Roe v. Wade at a national level. The primary motif of this poem is the work of eighteenth-century Dutch still-life painter Rachel Ruysch. Through creatively rendering (or reworking) her images, alongside other sources, into lyric verse, the poet attempts to produce textual and sonic arrangements akin to Ruysch’s floral bouquets and referencing the (fetal) anatomical dioramas created by her father, Frederik Ruysch. The poet aims to mobilize the creative mode of linguistic inquiry, poetry, to build a new vocabulary for attending to and grieving both living and nonliving things without reinforcing modern valorizations of individual property and personhood, which have mired and limited recent debates on “bodily autonomy” and have allowed the phrase my body, my choice to be wielded by both the Left and the Right for very different purposes. The entirety of the sequence is published here, preceded by an exegetical essay.
Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) is commonly known as a political thinker, economist, and revolutionary socialist. A person of versatile interests and skills, she was certainly a widely admired public speaker, journalist, publisher, teacher, translator, editor, and party leader, as well as an amateur botanist, an occasional painter, and–particularly in her final years–an avid birdwatcher. What also powerfully comes through in her writing (especially her letters), but has received little attention to date, is that she had the mind and pen of an urban ethnographer. In her thick, vivid accounts of urban sights and sounds, Luxemburg generously tapped into her senses and emotions, in the process revealing how affect shapes urban experiences and imaginaries. Focusing on practices and politics of maintenance and care, this paper offers an analysis of Luxemburg’s multisensory descriptions of her urban surroundings and ‘the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now’ that Doreen Massey theorized as throwntogetherness. Taking seriously Luxemburg’s observations in and about the city recorded in her letters and botanical notebooks reveals the small acts of commonplace theorizing that in academia are still too rarely recognized for what they are.
When Plutarch introduces Cleopatra in the Life of Antony, he notes that though she was not beautiful, she charmed those around her with her ability to speak an abundance of languages. In this passage, he associates the word hermeneus, «translator», with Cleopatra. Analyzing all appearances of hermeneus in Plutarch’s corpus reveals how, on the surface, Cleopatra’s association with the translator figure reinforces her reputation as a femme fatale, though this association gestures to a three-dimensional character who resists the two-dimensional bounds of extant written accounts—including Plutarch’s own.
This article reflects on an ongoing artistic research practice that deals with sound, gender, power, spatiality, and human–nonhuman entanglement. Sparked by a sound design for a less crunchy “lady-friendly” crisp, the research inquires the relationship between gender and sound at human–nonhuman encounter through making and thinking. Drawing on queer theory, sound studies, and posthumanism, it aims to transcend essentialist, vision-focused, and anthropocentric conceptualisations of gender and, as an insight gained from working with low-frequency sound waves, it reflects on sound as material-philosophically demonstrating human–nonhuman interconnectedness. The latter, as this article proposes, may encourage us to horizontalise hierarchies between the human and nonhuman. Finally, this text situates sonic thinking as a mode of trans*formative thinking: a process-oriented philosophy that aims to embrace the messy, queer ways of human–nonhuman relationality, which characterises a vibrant space from which this artistic research will further develop.
This contribution examines the metapragmatics of the ‘noisy’ voice: how voice performance that does not include the utterance of words is evaluated and discussed by different audiences and authors. Secrecy as being expressed through and by the transcendental voice is one aspect of these discussions, and notions of interiority of Self and Other are others. The paper thereby suggests that there are many options in conceptualizing language, and that secrecy and transcendentality may be crucial aspects of language as creative and social practice.
Ancient sources often describe non-human primates as imitative animals, i.e., living beings able to reproduce, with different degrees of perfection, gestures and movements carried out by human beings. Indeed monkeys are often characterized as mimeloi, mimetikoi , terms coming from the same semantic field of the noun mimos (< * mim -).
But what about the world of sounds? Are non-human primates regarded as good imitators and performers also when it comes to music and singing? Ancient evidence clearly indicates that other animal species (like nightingales or partridges), and not monkeys, were mainly regarded as excellent singers worthy of imitation by human beings. Through a detailed analysis of ancient Greek sources, especially some passages in Galen, this paper aims at investigating why non-human primates were not considered good singers. In particular, this survey tries to shed a new light on some cultural associations, according to which the small and weak voice of monkeys (µικροφωνία) and the voice of other figures in ancient society (like actors, musicians, kids, eunuchs and so on) were described in a similar way.
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