Queer Sound

http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2019/Introduction.htm

https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4187&context=gc_etds

https://hearisqueer.wordpress.com/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642529.2017.1422584 Jennifer Evans!

https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/jcs-2020-0047

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520241855/the-queer-composition-of-americas-sound

http://siupress.siu.edu/books/978-0-8093-2669-3

Partial Figures: Sound in Queer and Feminist Thought - Amalle Dublon

Andrew Brooks, “Glitch/Failure: Constructing a Queer Politics of Listening,” Leonardo Music Journal, Vol.25, December 2015, 37. [Link}( https://watermark.silverchair.com/lmj_a_00932.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAnYwggJyBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggJjMIICXwIBADCCAlgGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMHBP8CKhYe2ETnxNbAgEQgIICKY2kxjRUpFgeMSP6ezJgebTPiKiCGk6MjQYqRQiMe5Jg-24c55YD7lZdNzNx5hRvPbCHKNszTP-bNJuLHl3u5llxphHPsfwvVkJAJvSqlmpYc2BN49WbX7WHNXhvB0nw6L28V3LBV3KPSAmJkBvNHI6wjf9Le30osjeqoSotBoK-IRDfiFqiMnO7_KFwHlixIwYO8oaBsIg_PaL075oQy2DX6qGXMdAsj7-3cahOfVMDe1Ic1VraU8yfcCJ8QcNI7P9R5kCBLw_fgP3MmiOUEoR9FuLA5-CT8f-nFHSIyjMVg4KuCzurbeq3fVhXAJejOxWgSewH1nYlD9W1H6R2EH4saWtlneoVYF9lcFqArjZ0hMVYQqIxup8gPLUei2NDDg1DcxS0v7DFyoLvWYsXW4GJgBx47_bzW8XPzffmx-XOnwV6-zuCZhCWJE82agAhJ3NAH2LfG1ymNCl5f65LY5aqnkdgzu-bhCf3hDJaQ7VStZNOF0VgoCiVX7_3ISly5caN6CUGwXGXR-PChugFxv4ynlAdlBL-3igk-vcWSkh8ZAfk3-gUdnUbl2y2-HDaAo0YxAS6hg8aX1nmWhSoHtIuJxLdh6ELkSw5SYuMwwD-FX0-bqHK-hN9crZvRPxsmw0Q0NJB5ls1DJtrIBC9ZZAdsDlcIwW51Ml3-nyd8HzLxs7-YUutVruJqmr2YGDnFAqa1qM5oY344IHlxrD5J9T_1dCalktHc)

  • In his article, “Glitch/Failure: Constructing a Queer Politics of Listening,” Andrew Brooks works “to ‘queer’ the field of sound studies” through an analysis of glitch artists [3] and glitch musicians [4]. [5] Brooks conceptualizes a glitch as “both an error and intrusion into a system” which foregrounds the failure of technologies and its systems; an artistic practice that “highlight[s] the limits of media technologies and the productivity of aberration, malfunction and error.” [6] It is through this foregrounded failure of the glitch in which Brooks draws theoretical parallels to queer theory’s “reclaimed failure as a site of resistance to normative modes of existence.” [7]
  • the glitch would be useful for describing why data sonifications are left to be so unpleasant (current 4/27/2021 thoughts are to have some done with sound icons and others not?)
  • to “employ glitch as “a theoretical framework for understanding how disruption, deviation and disorder are productive in [musical] systems.” [8]
  • In glitching, or queering, the voice through technological intervention, Dorian forces the listener to consider the “experience as one that is mediated by technology and the environment.” [9] Electra therefore exposes the artifice of their voice as funneled through process of technology, metaphorically signaling the artifice of gender and conventional understandings of gendered vocal performance. As Brooks points out, this disruption is inherently queer and produces a queer listening practice which “highlights the contextual nature of the listening event … [or] a tuning into the sound of the [gendered] relations” of voice. [10]
  • “Considering performativity as a mode of authoritative speech and the production of static conceptions of gender and identity as the result of rehearsed and reiterated performances, queer theory glitches the understanding of identity as a stable and fixed category by introducing noisy concepts into normative systems” USEFUL FOR ADDING SONIFICATIONS INTO THE UNDERLYING SOUNDSCAPE
  • “Glitch, as a process-based art form, destabilizes the centrality of the author in the process of creation. By creating conditions that utilize chance and error as compositional tools, glitch artists create conditions that give rise to emergent systems in which agency is radically distributed. Noise is willfully introduced into sonic systems—as an aberration, error or figure of disruption—then multiplies wildly and unpredictably and manifests as audio noise in the resulting compositions”

Queer Listening

https://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/sep/17/queer-listening-interview-sergei-tcherepnin/

  • “In Search of Queer Sound,” Tcherepnin proposed that sound, and the process of listening, exists beyond pure materiality: listening as a social process, one that is not only natural, but also cultural. He suggested that much like linguistic comprehension, our perception of sound is socially coded.
    • useful when discussing positionality b/c I listen as a white queer trans/non-binary person and you can’t erase that from the process of the piece; complicates the idea of sound as objective/pure/absolute
  • “We are getting into sound ontology, which raises some philosophical questions about what sound actually is. In this discourse there are two leading perspectives: materialistic and linguistic. On the one hand, there is an idea that sound exists prior to any lexicon, language, or ideology: sound as pure material. On the other hand, we also understand sound in relation to language and its interpretation: sound as linguistic. You challenge both perspectives by not actually falling on either side of that debate… // ST: Yeah, that is interesting. I don’t think it has to be either/or… the idea that sound is a pure material is one thing I am reacting against, but it’s also a given that I am starting with in some way. I think that is why I am in this in-between state—emotionally, psychologically, we are very affected by sound in subjective and irrational ways that we can’t explain… the objective sound and the subjective response. We haven’t talked much about Maryanne Amacher, but that is what I find so unbelievably beautiful and amazing about her work. She was always so objective in her process, but unbelievably subjective at the exact same time… an uncanny combination of a rational mind and this absolutely irrational decision-making, which came out of just listening.”

Sound, Affect Theory, and Queerness

https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/09/14/sonic-tremblings-sound-affect-queer-body/

  • “Sound Studies tells us that we should trust our ears as much as our eyes, justifying our trust in sound, and of the resonating body. Affect Theory goes further, saying that all senses play into a body that processes input through levels of response, experience, and anticipation. Affect is the vibrational space that is both bodily memory and anticipation. So where do sound and affect meet in queer bodies? How do marginalized peoples use sound and the body to express liberation, objectification, joy, and struggle?
  • My articulation of affect with sound studies is necessarily queer, as it rejects binaries and speaks without definitive vocabulary, syntax, or grammar. Marta Figlerowicz, in “Affect Theory Dossier: An Introduction,” offers a good primer on the widely divergent ways in which scholars use the idea of affect. In Figlerowitz’s explanation, affect is always a self in motion, be it “the self running ahead of itself,” “the self catching up with itself,” “the self as self-discursive and always constantly mutating and adapting to ambient stimuli,” and/or “celebrations of Proustian moments when the self and the sensory world, or the conscious and the unconscious self, or the self and another person, fall in step with each other… to make a sliver of experience more vivid and more richly patterned than willful analysis could ever have” (4). In all of these cases, the body’s perception and the discourse of the self remain in motion, trembling with identifications that are at best fleeting, though richly communicative and expressive. Sound, as an always-present stimulus, works affectively in such a form of communication.
  • “Queer bodies are inherently intertwined in theorizing sound and affect. The actual concept of affect itself is queer, implicating the unknowable, but concretely felt phenomena of the body. But rather than forming a linear narrative, affect is produced, and received, in a web of physical and neural processes that rejects the linear concept of time and instead are never static but self-referential and constantly evolving in response to our environment. To navigate this space I adopt the term “affective field,” used by Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle in their introductory essay to Sound, Music, Affect. An affective field describes a textural field of play between stimulus, meaning, and response; it relies on reproduction and broadcast, a field of listening/emitting/processing machines all working in a sort of continuous flow, always already present. The affective field model encourages the removal of emphasis on subject/object but instead focuses on interfacial relationships as a point of contact. Eradicating =the subject/object dualism is vital to exchange, as Yvon Bonenfant says in “Queer Listening to Queer Vocal Timbres“: “We cannot exchange with an object, only other subjects” (76).”
  • it also helps break down the essential binary between encoded language and un-encoded sound. Rather than syntactical sound, noise communicates in trembles, resonating in both the psyche and in the actual body. Noise worked to unify disparate parts of identity–and disparate identities–a coalescing rather than normalizing process, a trembling vital to queer identity.
    • useful for discussing the overlap between past and present, and how my work does not treat it as a binary; escpaing the binary of history versus present? something like that
  • “In fact, it might just be in endurance that I can best articulate tremblings as a sonic, somatic, affective phenomenon. Born of present stimuli, always connected to past experiences and anticipatory of the future, tremblings are unruly, unable to be pinpointed. They do not just express the order or pleasure that we find in traditional music, though they can encompass this as well. Instead, tremblings are communicative, they move through the I, the subject, while unifying other subjects through their rich and unnamable identifications. It speaks simultaneously to and against the limitations placed on queer bodies, expressing joy, pain, pleasure.”