In this book, I examine how alternative tools for music production can be a way of emancipation for female artists and artists from, gender minorities. For a long time I have wondered how to navigate the field of electronic music as an artist from the FLINTA* community. I look for tools that can emancipate
us from the male dominated field of music production.

When I began this research, I was interested in learning how to build my own systems through coding and program-ming. I wanted to create tools closely related to my practice, mainly to produce music. I have always been very interested
in open-source software and started my experiments with PureData. This quickly led me to learn basic electronics
to design a controller for the synth I was developing. I learned more about the history of synthesizers history and digital technologies. It seems difficult to talk about electronic music without talking about digital technologies in general, as while producing, you always use some type of analog or digital machine, ranging from mixers, samplers, computers with
a DAW to a simple tool like a piezo microphone.

The way we view the digital technology field shows
how we view the electronic music field, as the latter is at the crossroad between music and digital technologies. These two are fields where gender representation shows a lot of disparity. On top of discovering more about the history of our digital tools, I navigated the electronic music scene which is very male-identified. Back in 2021, I took part in a workshop in Brussels where members of an Algorave collective were showing us how to code music with Tidal Cycles, a software for making patterns with code and samples. The registering system was on a “first come first served” basis. Out of 15 participants, we were only two female-identifying participants and one non-binary participant in the room.

The disparity we see nowadays in those very male-identified fields actually “represent[s] historically-grown societal power relations, rather than ademographic reality”as documents displaying the important role of female artists in early electronic music are being re-discovered. If archives are now being brought to daylight, there are a lot of stories and living experiences that we might never find again because they were not recorded. Possible explanations for this situation are that they were not considered as significant enough to be kept in records at the time, or because FLINTA* people (Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Non-binary, Trans, Agender and all other gender minority groups) practicing electronic music or tinkering with digital technologies were not part of the official academic sphere or from renown research groups. Discussions revolving around the representation of the FLINTA* community in the music sphere are more intense than ever, especially in the more alternative scenes where new collectives are pushing for better gender representation.

During your reading, I encourage you to stop if you do not know the artists I mention, and to listen to their music because there are feelings that words cannot convey. I provide song suggestions to listen to throughout the thesis, also resulting in a tracklist at the end of the book. For better legibility, I will refer to “digital technologies” as is, or as “technologies”. When I talk about technologies in general outside of the digital technology field, I refer to them with an uppercase T.

At the very beginning of computer history, there were women. The term “computer” itself meant “one who computes” when it was created in the early 17th century. The first recorded written reference of the word dates back to 1613. It used to describe a person performing mathematical calculations, before computers as we know them became commercially available.
It was very often women who performed this job, as it was tedious work during which they would undertake long calculations. This job was considered as labour and secretarial work, and black women computers worked in segregated situations. At that time, the term “kilo-girl” was invented by a member of the Applied Mathematics Panel in the 1940s to measure computing time, resulting in “kilo-girl-hours”.
One “kilo-girl of energy” was roughly about a thousand hours of computing labour. Back then, almost all people employed as computers were women. One report even said "programming requires lots of patience, persistence and a capacity for detail and those are traits that many girls have”.

In the 1800s, the first person to ever write and publish an algorithm was a woman working as a computer:
Ada Lovelace, a British mathematician and writer. The program was intended to be executed by the first modern computer, the Analytical Engine created by Charles Babbage. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer. It was at that time that the word “computer” started being used for a machine aiming at calculating logical operations with a set of instructions. Ada Lovelace’s articles were largely unknown until the 1950s, which is no surprise as women’s work was often not credited or acknowledged. Therefore, a lot of their research did not make its way into public records and archives and thus the massive influence of women that shaped the computing field that we know today was either downplayed or totally erased. However, women treated astronomical data, calculated ballistic trajectories, and were the first programmers.

The first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer was called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) and was completed in 1945. The programmers of the ENIAC computer in 1944 were six female mathematicians; Marlyn Meltzer, Betty Holberton, Kathleen Antonelli, Ruth Teitelbaum, Jean Bartik, and Frances Spence. They were human computers at the Moore School's computation lab and were known as the “ENIAC girls”. ENIAC was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. It was completed in 1945. The women who worked on ENIAC were warned that they would not be promoted into professional ratings which were only for men. Designing the hardware was “men's work” and programming the software was “women's work”. It was along with the first electronic computers that the distinction between hardware and software appeared.

The hardware is the physical part of the machine, and the software is the set of instructions installed and run by the hardware part of the machine. Thus one does not exist without the other. Writing software was a woman's task at the beginning, as it was perceived as unprestigious and because they had prior experiences as human computers. The men designed the blueprints and built the “hard” part of the machine. The first person to have coined the term “Software Engineering” was Margaret Hamilton. She developed the guidance and navigation system for the Apollo spacecraft as head of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. Margaret Hamilton invented the term to describe her work, and “to bring the software legitimacy”. The term “soft”, used as opposed to the term “hard”, was at first intended as a joke.

Photo of the U.S. Army.
Left: Patsy Simmers, holding ENIAC board
Next: Mrs. Gail Taylor, holding EDVAC board
Next: Mrs. Milly Beck, holding ORDVAC board
Right: Mrs. Norma Stec, holding BRLESC-I board

Women computer operators program ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer, by plugging and unplugging cables and adjusting switches.

The “ENIAC girls” only got the recognition they deserved in the 1980s when Kathy Kleiman, a young Harvard Undergraduate, was doing her research. She stumbled upon an old photograph of the first electronic computer. On the picture, you could see some men and women demonstrating the machine, but only the men were identified. She then questioned a university historian who told her that the women were just hired to pose in front of the computer,that they were just “Refrigerator Ladies”. But when Kleiman started digging up information, she discovered that the women in the pictures were far more than just that.

When we see the overall lack of information on women in general in early computer science, the situation of BIPOC women in the field was even worse. This is further illustrated by the almost complete lack of data on the BIPOC members of the ENIAC programmers.

NASA’s computing history unveils BIPOC women pioneers that were forgotten like Katherine Johnson who calculated the trajectory for America’s first space trip while facing racism and sexism throughout her career. There is also Melba Roy Mouton, whose work provided the sort of access that allowed millions of people to view satellites in action. She then became the first Hispanic female astronaut. Among the programmers who contributed to the Scout launch vehicle was Dorothy Voghan. The Scout vehicle was a rocket used to launch the first American satellites into orbit around the Earth.
In 1949, Dorothy Vaughan was appointed director of the West Area Computers and thus became one of the first women at NASA to hold a supervisory position.

Electronic music situates itself at the crossroad between music and technologies: two male-identified fields. Thus, what that history retains from the role of female and people from gender minorities in digital technologies can influence what narratives were kept about early electronic music history.

Not many musicians practicing electronic music know that the first known electronic piece of music was Music Of The Spheres, composed by Johanna Magdalena Beyer in 1938.
If you go on the Wikipedia page of “Electronic Music”, you will see no mention of her, or of any women until the mid late 1950s. Every picture of a technician or artist on this page is a cis gendered male.

Articles presenting “Women in electronic music” are mostly published on “International Women’s Day”, and only enumerate major pioneers figures such as Wendy Carlos, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram… Further, a lot of these articles were published after the release of the 2020 movie Sisters with Transistors by Lisa Rovner, a documentary film telling the stories of some pioneering women of electronic music. But other women worked along those well-known figures. Abi Bliss, a writer specialized in musical history and journalism, warns about the recent unveiling of these female pioneers. She points out that:

This fetishization can lead to portraying them as “oddities and exceptions” to their time, and also to the shadowing of many other female electronic musicians from that time. Among those shadowed artists, there is Else Marie Pade. In 1954, she became the first Danish composer of electronic music and musique concrète and her 1958 work Syv Cirkler (Seven Circles) was the first purely electronic composition to be broadcast on Danish radio. Another important figure of the technology and music field is Carla Scaletti, a musician and programmer who worked on computer generated music. She designed the Kyma sound generation computer language, which is still used by sound designers to this day. 

Some of the most influential women in electronic music did not even know about their peers. For example, Suzanne Cianni did not know the existence of Delia Derbyshire -whose work only became famous years after Derbyshire’s death in 2001- until Cianni was dubbed “the Delia Derbyshire of the Atari generation”. Delia Derbyshire was an English musician and composer who carried out pioneering work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during the 1960s like the now famous Doctor Who music theme. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was one of the sound effects units of the BBC which was created in 1957 by Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe.

As usual it was a struggle to find any information of early electronic music outside of Europe and the US. I managed to gather some information regarding cis gendered male composercis gendered male composer but did not find anything regarding female composers before the late 60s.

In Tinkering with Cultural Memory, Tara Rodgers writes about an RCA LP from the 1950s, showcasing the RCA synthesizer’s sound. The RCA Corporation was a major American electronics company, which was founded as the Radio Corporation of America in 1919. The RCA electrical engineers Harry Olson and Hebart Belar were appointed to develop an instrument capable of auto-generated pop hits by automating arrangements and using electronically generated sounds. The RCA synthesizer is considered to be the first programmable synth. After the release of this LP, Harry Olson received a lot of letters of interest for the synthesizers, many of which were written by women wanting to know more about the functioning and design of the machine. Despite this, “Olson recommended to RCA’s marketers that they place advertisements for the synthesizer (…) in hifi-audio and electronics engineering magazines, which was perhaps a move to direct the emerging market towards men”. She also found a typed document from 1955 detailing the equipment and personnel for installing the RCA synthesizer: “the one ‘female operator’ responsible for administrative duties was crossed out by hand, while men who worked in supervisory or technical roles were retained.”

Because of the erasure and downplaying of female-identifying persons and those from gender minorities, we now find ourselves with highly male-identified practices in the digital technology and electronic music fields. But as we saw earlier, the disparity in gender representation “represent[s] historically-grown societal power relations, rather than a demographic reality”.

Archives are vital to the construction of what history retains. They can either further or destroy systemic power imbalances. It is the collection and preservation of narratives within archives that allow us to access historical experiences and identities. Indeed, “a well-known challenge for historians
of marginalized subjects is that cultural materials tend not to survive or be preserved in institutional archives". This is a challenge that I encountered myself during my research. This problem makes imperative the need of archiving as a member of the FLINTA* community. This is also why I decided to develop a webarchive to accompany this research, where I collect the references I came across. This serves as a means to make this research as open as possible. The archive will be open to contributions for the visitors of the website. Nowadays, a lot of initiatives exist to preserve queer and FLINTA* history in electronic music or in the digital field, especially under the form of websites: the Cyber Feminism Index by Mindy Seu, the Queer Digital History Project, female:pressure or NERDGIRLS - herstory of electronic by the musician AGF to name just a few. All these archives were conceived by people affected and concerned by these subjects. It is often the task of FLINTA* people to uncover and protect their own histories.

The erasure or downplaying of the FLINTA* community in archives is not only due to plain discrimination, but can also be traced down to the figure of the “isolated genius”. This genius inventor or musician is going to be pinned down as the one person that started it all. Nevertheless, they were all shaped by something or someone, and some other researchers or artists could be opening the same gates at the same time. We all resonate with what we meet, like waves intercepting and perturbing each other. But it is as if we applied an EQ on history, thus rendering some frequencies inaudible.

On the contrary, history is far from linear and more like a rhizome. A wider spectrum encompassing all frequencies or a polyphony. Polyphony is a type of music in which different autonomous melodies intertwine. They create moments of harmony and dissonance together. I think the term “polyphony” as Anna Tsing uses it in The Mushroom at the End of the World is a great way to understand what is at play in our current vision of what history is like:

“These forms [polyphonies] seem archaic and strange to many modern listeners because they were superseded by music in which a unified rhythm and melody holds the composition together. (...) we are used to hearing music with a single perspective.”

History does not just have “a single perspective”. This way of seeing time and history as linear can lead to the invisibilisation of those that did not make it on the path we choose to see as the more important one. In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K.Le Guin goes against the myth of the Hero whose point of view of the story is always red, erasing other points of view. However if “one avoids the linear, progressive, Time's(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic” then there is a place for everyone to tell their own story, and “there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things”.

While archives are being rediscovered, discussions about gender representation and equality are globally gaining power in society in general. Therefore, we are discovering a lot more about the contribution of minorities in technology and music as some researchers open archives and investigate. Those discussions also brought more light on musicians and DJs from the FLINTA* community in the industry. According to the female:pressure FACTS survey 2022:

“FACTS 2022 reveals a rise in the proportion of female acts from 9.2% in 2012 to 26.9% in 2020–2021. The data on non-binary artists shows an increase from 0.4% to 1.3% from 2017 to 2021. (…) However, with female and non-binary acts comprising only a little over a quarter of all artists booked, there is still a significant imbalance in gender representation on electronic music festival stages today.”

female:pressure FACTS survey 2022,
Gender proportions of festival acts
[Above: 2012 to 2021. Below: 2020 to 2021]

female:pressure FACTS survey 2022,
Female, male, non-binary and mixed acts by festival size in three [above] and five [below] categories
[2020 to 2021]

Solène: There are several events per year in our school such as workshop weeks. They often end with a music event or a party. Martha, one of the teachers, was pissed that the people showing up for performances were always guys and that no one questioned it. There is a boy in my class who’s a DJ playing in a lot of venues and it was every time he and his friends who performed. Martha couldn't stand it so she asked us if we knew other people making music and she even asked us "Why wouldn’t you make music then?” So we did.

Luisa Mei: Probably it does. When I first started learning a lot of people discouraged me: “SuperCollider is so hard. It’s going to be difficult, you’re going to want to drop out of the class” whatever. But that made me actually more willing to succeed (laughs). And I proved them wrong. I can use SuperCollider, it's not that hard. I think getting there people were kind of doubting me. Not in a mean way, kind of joking but still. But now as a performer I don’t feel there’s too many barriers for me to do what I want.

Maëva: When I look around me, most of the guys we know who make noise or set up collectives, they play together directly like “we already have a practice, we're here”. While we really did not feel legitimate to promote ourselves or anything. We don't introduce ourselves by saying “I make music”. Now we do so a lot more because we understand that we are actually really doing something. For guys who have been making music for a shorter time than us, it's almost obvious for them that they have a practice and they're going to promote themselves directly to people for concerts or something.

“Three out of four of the survey’s participants acknowledge that gender has an influence on the field of music and sound art. More precisely, 65% of the female respondents, 27% of the male and 62% of the trans, intersex, and non binary respondents answered positively to at least ten out of the thirteen questions with asked explicitly on the influence of gender on several aspects of the question.”

[MONRHEA]: That’s definitely happening. For example, in Santuri, there’s the class that is specially made to push women and non-binary people. And also ANTI-MASS in Uganda who is also involved in the courses. (…) So the discussions are definitely going on, and organizations are supporting it and happy for the future. Because I feel like if you block someone from expressing who they naturally feel they won’t be happy in a basic way. The future is good, I think. At least in Kenya there are organisations for queer people, there are organisers who are pushing this.

Luisa Mei: I would say from what I’ve seen it’s pretty equal. There’s a lot of non-binary people, the whole community has a really good attitude of being totally accepting of every one. I do remember in school though I was the only girl in my class. But once I got out and started performing and seeing other people, and from what I’ve seen we’re pretty well represented. I mean I’ve performed in New York City which is probably one of the more open places and has the greatest diversity so I think I’m lucky to be able to experience that.

1. “computer”. Oxford English Dictionary (Third ed.). Oxford University Press. March 2008. “1613 'R. B.' Yong Mans Gleanings 1, I have read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that ever breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number.”
2. The Applied Mathematics Panel was created at the end of 1942 in order to solve mathematical problems related to the military effort in World War II. The panel's headquarters were in Manhattan.
3. Megan Garber, “Computing Power Used to Be Measured in ‘Kilo-Girls'”, The Atlantic, October 17, 2013
4. Carol Frieze and Quesenberry, “Cracking the Digital Ceiling: Women in Computing around the World, Cambridge University Press, 2019
5. John Fuegi and Jo Francis, “Lovelace & Babbage and the creation of the 1843 'notes'”, Annals of the History of Computing, 2003.
6. Jennifer S. Light, “When Computers Were Women”, Technology and Culture, 1999.
7. Ibid.
8. Lori Cameron, “What to Know About the Scientist Who Invented the Term ‘Software Engineering'”, IEEE, June 26 2018
9. Liz Huang, “Refrigerator Ladies: The First Computer Programmers”, Medium, March 8th, 2018
10. Rhizome is an American not-for-profit arts organization that supports and provides a platform for new media art since 1996.
11. Extract from the article itself
12. Abi Bliss, “Invisible Women”, The Wire, April 2013
13. El Hunt, “Electronic Ladyland: why it’s vital we celebrate the female pioneers of synth”, NME (New Musical Express), 2020
14. Tara Rodgers, “Tinkering with Cultural Memory, Gender and the Politics of Synthesizer Historiography”, 2013
15. Julia Eckhardt, “Grounds For Possible Music, On gender, voice, language and identity”, 2018
16. Tara Rodgers, “Tinkering with Cultural Memory, Gender and the Politics of Synthesizer Historiography”, 2013
17. Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Of Fiction”, 1996

Exposing the circuitry

“’Technology’ and ‘hi tech’ are not synonymous, and a technology that isn't ’hi’,isn't necessarily ’low’ in any meaningful sense.”

“With the tracker of the gameboy you can only play 3 notes at a time. I have 2 of them so I can play 6 notes at the same time. I find a lot of inspiration in musical tools that have a lot of restrictions. That's why this story of the instrument that has only 5 strings speaks to me a lot. It's a bit like: how are you going to convey something emotionally strong with very little material. At one point I was really into lullabies because they can be super heavy emotionally, but the melody has to be super simple at the same time to be easily remembered and passed down.”

• gadevoi (Xaxalxe) - je nous ai creusé un nid dans mon cœur mais comme tous les oiseaux tu devais t'envoler

LSDJ Tracker screenshots

Excerpt from Flower Electronics Little Boy Blue synthesizer manual, designed by Jessica Rylan, 2006

“Here, the mic goes to the preamp. The output of osc.1 goes to mix.1. But osc.1 is also being controlled by the mic. The preamp out also goes to the input of the envelope follower. The e.f. is controlling osc.2. Osc.2 goes to the direct in. Total p.e. [power electronics] style!”

• Jessica Rylan - Lonely at Night

“The OS will be liable for reconfiguring content generated by hierarchical ontological pasts; those rooted in slavery, settler-colonialism, prison and military industrial complexes will be targeted for special attention. The OS will be responsible for transposing such content, reordering vertical relations into horizontal, circular, reversible, retractable, prescient, and/or prophetic forms, writing code for programming that makes explicit and holds space for new forms. (…) Execution of this operating system is only possible if one takes into account the context in which a machine is situated.”

Instagram post of Nadja Buttendorf

29th of January 2019

“Only games that are NOT sexist and racist and do not show colonial settlement behaviour may be played!”

transCoder, a queer programming anti-language.

2008-2012

Queer Technologies critiques the heteronormative, capitalist, militarized underpinnings of technological architectures, design, and functionality.

System recovery, re-programming our technologies

“By applying this metaphor of gender applied to the cables back to human, I speculate a fictional society where people’s gender is functioning like that of cables. In this sci-fi, society consists of gender-neutral post-human bodies with more than two-gendered (though it exists in a broader, non-binary spectrum) genitals each. Their sexual intercourse happens on a big-group scale involving countless connections of genitals. Due to multidirectional connections that they make, the intercourse is not limited on the ground surface but forms an architectural construction made of human bodies. (…) Anyone who doesn’t fit neatly in that category might be comparable to the gender-non-conforming ways of connection, such as twisting the wires together. Those queer ways of cable connection are not usually recommended since it is not secure enough and may arouse confusion.”

Arca

Eilien: (…) [F]or now I haven’t been using that much live manipulation of my singing but more samples of my singing. But I think in regard to this gender related stuff, in my older pieces and sounds there has been this urge to somehow hide my voice with pitch shifting and some effects. Or maybe not to hide it but to multiply it, so it would be less like “oh there is this one gendered voice”. I’ve found it really nice and emancipating. But I feel that during the recent months I’ve gained security in my voice. I started to make sounds that have barely no effects at all, where the voice has been unprocessed. But definitely I think pitch shifting, multiplying is funny and emancipatory to be able to play with your gendered voice, make it less gendered or confusing.

• Eilien - FEELS2

Celebrating crash as a reboot strategy

“LuvPunk12 as a chatroom handle was a nascent performance, an exploration of a future self. I was a young body: Black, female-identifying, femme, queer. There was no pressing pause, no reprieve; the world around me never let me forget these identifiers. Yet online I could be whatever I wanted.”

“Users trying to access Feminet would dial in and be directed to a completely different site. There they would be asked for a password, which was listed in the back of ‘TV-TS Tapestry’, one of the major transgender zines of the time. If they did not have it, they’d be bounced.”

This shows how digital tools can be an important tool of emancipation for minorities in general, allowing them to create a sense of community and to form alternative spaces. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of the people I know who take an interest in reflecting on technology on a theoretical level or who are very into open source are usually female-gendered, from gender minorities and/or queer. As a queer person and/or member of the FLINTA*+ community, we often have to build our own survival system inside of the hetero-cis and patriarchal system we live in. For a large amount of people still, if you happen to not be what they expected of you (meaning hetero-cis or a very well behaved cis gendered female), you are considered as odd, dysfunctional or even as a “failure”.

The Backroom BBS

Area: New York, NY

Years of activity: 1986-1997

Puss N Boots BBS

Area: Richardson, TX Grand Prarie, TX

Years of activity:1991-1995

GenderNet

Area: Sunnyvale, CA; later Oakland, CA

Years of activity: 1984 - ?

TCNE BSS

Area: Waltham, MA

Years of activity: 1992-1997

FEMAIL BBS

Area: Frankfurt, Germany

Years of activity: 1993 - ?

We soon realize that “we will never be given the keys to a utopia architected by hegemony” and thus have to conceive our own systems to live in, where this “failure” is viewed as a potential. Considering Muñoz: 

“Queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an identity. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an identity that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain.”

“To invite Bye Bye Binary within an institution is to bet on research and experimentations. It is to work with partial shapes, forever evolving and in construction, opening up collective imaginations. (…) Bye Bye Binary is not a coat of queer varnish on the shit that surrounds us. Bye Bye Binary is not at your service. Bye Bye Binary is not only functional. Bye Bye Binary is L O V E & R A G E.” C°C

“We are seen and unseen, visible and invisible. At once error and correction to the 'machinic enslavement’ of the straight mind (...) We cannot wait around to be remembered, to be humanized, to be seen.”

I think there is so much potential not only in deconstructing the technologies themselves but also in rethinking our identities and bodies through technologies. I like to reflect on the relationship we have with our electronic instruments in terms of exchange between us and the machine. How could we design a machine that we do not have total control upon, and thus that is not only a one-way “request and response” interaction but an “interaction with an interface [that] might transform both the user and the system”.

1. Zach Blas, Micha Cárdenas, Jacob Gaboury, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Margaret Rhee, QueerOS: A User’s Manual, Fiona Barnett, 2016
2. Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect, Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
3. Ursula K.Le Guin, A Rant About “Technology”, 2004
4. Ursula K.Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1996
5. Tara Rodgers, Pink Noises
6. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K.Le Guin 1996
7. Abigail Ybarra: The Queen of Tone, She Shreds, Issue 11, 2016
8. David S. F. Portree, Mir Hardware Heritage, March 1995
9. Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, 2015
10. Transgender women found and created community in the 1980s internet, Emma MacGowan, 16th of June 2022
11. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 2009
12. Away From Keyboard. It is different as IRL (In Real Life) which suggests that the life we experience online is not real.

Melting interfaces

• 1 - Plugging nothing but potentiometers and having total control on the parameters of sound.
• 2 - Plugging some potentiometers and some sensors getting data from the environment. This would result in more of a collaboration between the machine, its user and the environment.
• 3 - Plugging in nothing but sensors and getting data from the environment. Therefore having no control at all on the sound. This method removes the user from the scheme. I think it results in a very poetic thing, letting the synth and the environment work together while the user is only an observer from the outside.

“Being queer means inventing your own systems, bending circuits.
Queerness is having to hack and reconfigure.
Queer technology stands against efficiency and performativity.
Queer systems are fluid, resisting rigid structures.”

Luisa Mei: I think it’s probably not the type of sound that feels closer to me but maybe the structure of the interface that I use. In Ableton there are so many presets and things that you can use and you can map it very easily to your controller, it’s just very convenient. But the thing I enjoy about SuperCollider is that I can build my own sort of interface, and how I want it to be.

[MONRHEA]: It’s a tool, an opportunity not to be on a grid system that has one purpose: it has to be this way. You’re using a tool that is made from freedom, you just go however you feel.

• Luisa Mei - I am The Metal Son
• [MONRHEA] - or maybe

Xaxalxe: There was a kind of challenge which was to do musical stuff with as few lines of code as possible. For example you can put all the numbers from 1 to 10 in loops, and you can try to modify that afterwards depending how it sounds. Since you're not saying to yourself “oh I'm going to do a sinusoidal wave, I'm going to do a filter, etc.” It's hard to imagine what the code you write is going to sound like.

Because my system is DIY, it is sometimes prone to noisy errors, like sudden change of the sound then getting back to normal or sudden outbursts of percussive sounds in the middle of a drone session. The goal is to embrace the bugs and defaults. Embracing the silence it sometimes makes when it crashes as a

Design of the synthesizer panel

The synthesizer

temporality that the machine creates as an integral part of the performance. I play in response to the machine. I wait for it to restart so we can begin another chapter of the performance. As I do not know when it might or if it will stop, I have to be flexible and not come into the performance with a plan in mind. As opposed to having a structured composition, I have to feel what evolution of the sound could go next in the heat of the moment. You have to pay extra attention to the sound.

Eilien: In SuperCollider you don’t see the waveforms. Well you can but it’s maybe not what you think about when you first start with SuperCollider so I could focus on listening.

[MONRHEA]: When I came to SonicPi, it taught me to tap into a more performative aspect. There is a very interesting feature in Sonic Pi where you can set “transparency” and set background visuals so you can use that to tell a story or just be creative in various ways. (…) You can customize it depending on the performance. Depending on how you’re feeling or what message you want to share. Compared to Ableton, if we’re talking about the user interface, it’s much more structured and in tones of grey. With Sonic Pi, you can even use the interface to tell a story with your music with the transparency feature I talked about earlier.

“We demand: Give us access to the performer's mind, to the whole human instrument. Obscurantism is dangerous. Show us your screens. (…) Code should be seen as well as heard, underlying algorithms viewed as well as  their visual outcome.” 

Luisa Mei: I think for everyone to make tools is another level to really figure things out about yourself because since you’re building it yourself you can decide how you want to interact with it, and you have to figure out how you want to feel when you’re performing.

crysoma: When we play live, we always worry about how loud it's going to be. We never crank up the volume to its maximum, overpowering the listener. We try to be in a form of listening care. We saw lots of noise concerts in Besançon, and we saw a lot of male artists who did not care about blowing up everyone's ears.

Weird (Queer?) sounds

“Have you established any relationship(s) between noise music and feminism/queerness? If so, what would they be?”

Maëva from crysoma: To me there is this alternative culture situating itself in the DIY movement, of emancipating yourself from a melody, from the rules, from a structure. Finding ways to deviate from expected things. It's also more of an un-normative practice. I also find it important within my practice to find tools that give you infinite ways of producing. There is also this idea of being weird I think (laughs).

• crysomatening: crysoma - Azamide Aplenfen

“Queer people, people of color, and female-identifying people have an enduring and historical relationship to the notion of ‘remix’. To remix is to rearrange, to add to, an original recording. The spirit of remixing is about finding ways to innovate with what’s been given, creating something new from something already there.” Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell, 2020”

• Turkana & Authentically Plastic - Diesel Femme

“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.”

“I didn’t know why I wanted the bells. I just kept buying them because they were cheap, and I liked the sound, and I’ve always liked the idea of making art with trash. But why was I drawn to making music with discarded objects? By the time I began collecting bells, I was already aware of the tendency for my music to reveal something about me before I consciously realized it myself. (…) Now I can only think of the bells in all their worthlessness and complexity as a very thinly veiled sappy metaphor for discarded queer life, and for the past few years that has felt like the right thing to do.”

“One day I’ll grow up
and be a beautiful woman
One day I’ll grow up
and be a beautiful girl
But for today I am a child
For today I am a boy”

Eilien: Maybe I haven’t been thinking about it this directly. But I think maybe I have had the feeling that it’s hard to use some pre-existing sound libraries or presets sounds or anything because the majority of sounds that you find are always referring to some genres, movies, a specific time… And many of these associations, somehow, I don’t want them (laughs). (…) If you would really interpret these tendencies, I think it could be thought of that way that like these sounds refer to culture and a cultural history which I don’t think resembles me that well because many of those sounds are so related to a pretty male dominated culture.

Eilien: About these sounds that don’t resemble others, it is easier to make them with tools which are not so commonly used. To look at sound or music from a really weird angle.

Xaxalxe: It's clear that I never felt compared with other people who are making music because I'm just doing my thing. There are maybe 2/3 artists who are doing similar stuff but it's like a project that existed for 3 years in 2014 or something. It allows me to make music without comparing myself, which is pretty cool and liberating. (…) I think I like this thing about getting out of comparisons, otherwise you're going to be like “the girl who plays the guitar” you see. Whereas if you have a practice which is less readable it can allow you to get out of that.

Xaxalxe: When you assemble different machines, it's a bit like creating your own systems as well. For example, nobody uses the same system as me. For example I watch videos of effects pedals and it's always people testing them with a guitar, and I always wonder “But what would it be like with a Gameboy?”.

[MONRHEA]: I will definitely encourage female artist and queer people in general to use SonicPi or other music coding software cause Ableton and FLStudio are already quite male dominated. If we embrace such a tool that is still growing in his community. You can customize it depending on the music performance. Depending on how you’re feeling or what message you want to share. (…) It’s a world of different possibilities. So we have a chance and an opportunity to take that space in that world. There is a space for us I think.

The economy of open source project

and alternatives technologies

Maëva from crysoma:: I do not have any bases in Ableton so it's always Solène who takes care of that. Even to record and everything. Finding a way to be autonomous without software or without an instrument that you don't know how to use is super important and it feels super nice. It's a way to free yourself from all the rules and make sound without necessarily having any prior knowledge. You always have to pay for software and instruments are super expensive. So even economically, making your own tools is interesting.

Xaxalxe: When I started making music with computers, it was with open source software. That's also why I had a lot of driver’s issues and stuff. I was using Ardour, an open source DAW. It was either that or LLMS but Ardour is more developed. It's super advanced but like all open-source software, you have some random bugs and when you make music and you lose what you've been doing for an hour it's a bit annoying. I had done concerts in 2016 when I started to organize parties. Back then my set up was very precarious. I hadn't found an open source autotune that I liked, so I used a plugin meant for Windows that I emulated with Wine. I reconnected it with a specific Linux distribution where they develop their own software. In this distribution there was a software that allows you to patch other software together, to re-record the patches, but it was really a hassle. Recently I installed Windows on a 10-year-old computer because I just wanted it to work, so now I have Ableton and that's it.

Eilien: (…) All of those coding, DIY methods for producing sounds are very technical so because of that it might be hard for emancipation. Though I feel it has the potential. But in other ways it’s super accessible because for example SuperCollider doesn’t cost anything.

1. Forking is to create a new branch out of a primary direction or based on a primary distribution in digital technologies. I use it in this context to indicate that FLINTA* artists branch out of the main narrative which is male dominated.
2. Jack Halberstam, “The Queer Art Of Failure”, 2011
3. Legacy Russell, “Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto”, 2020
4. Lloyd Gedye, “ANTI-MASS’ queerness is in both genre and gender”, New Frame, 2021
5. Angel E. Fraden, Interview of Authentically Plastic, Okay Africa.
6. Peaches, is a Canadian electroclash/punk rock musician and producer.
7. Marie Thompson, “Feminised noise and the ‘dotted line’ of sonic experimentalism”, Contemporary Music Review Vol.35, 2016
8. Airek Beauchamp, “Live Through This: Sonic Affect, Queerness,and the Trembling Body”, 2015
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Marion Wasserbauer, “On Queer Musical Memories”, “Grounds For Possible Music, On gender, voice, language and identity”, Julia Eckhardt, 2018
12. Jean Lacaille, Authentically Plastic : “la musique est notre garde du corps naturel !”, PAM (Pan African Music), October 1st 2019