Thesis Outline Mitsa

Introduction

Through my thesis, I want to explore how animacies (Chen, 2012), the agency and the living value that bodies and inanimate objects carry with them depending on political binaries such as natural/artificial, male/female, human/animal, influence listening interpretations and sound production. Having the experiential knowledge of not fitting into my assigned gender at birth, my writing will focus on how gender difference can be created and traced through sound signification; how binary categorisations can influence a listener's attention and signification, the choice and the motives for recording specific sounds, the decision making on what feels desired while sound editing, the performativity of collective jamming-interacting through sound. Though my interest emerges from the fixed male/female binary, I believe that notions such as natural, monstrous and artificial are strongly connected to gender standarisation and will be present throughout my research.

I realise that I cannot and I should not represent a generalised way that bodies perceive sound, so I will approach my writing through autoethnography; I will commence from my living experience, incorporating my own perceptions, biases and feelings around gender binary and sound, in an attempt to initiate a dialogue that exceeds my self. The autoethnographic writing is experimental, involves the position and experiences of the researcher, carries their vulnerability, can be fragmented and partial, sheds light to subjugated narrations and situates the personal into larger social contexts. (Gannon, 2017)

With this thesis I aim to support the practices of my graduation project through different writing methods; I will try to provide a theoretical frame around technologies that (de)construct gender and can enhance my research, to define the notion of animacy hierarchies and to introduce somatics. I will document my process of listening as an analytical tool for reflecting on the different sound attempts in relation to my graduation project. I will explore my decision making on recording and sampling sounds connected to my own perception of gender embodiment, as well as the processes of sound editing for sound empowerment or subversion. Finally I will document the preparation and reflection processes of the collective jams that will take place throughout the year and will embody aspects of my research.

The text will be synthesised by the following chapters;

Body of Text

MY TAKE ON ANIMACY HIERARCHIES AND THE EMBODIMENT OF GENDER BINARY

This chapter will be an introduction around the concept of animacy and my special interest for the male/female binary. For this chapter I am going to use theory from the books Counter-sexual manifesto (Preciado, Kevin Gerry Dunn and Halberstam, 2018), Animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect (Chen, 2012) and from references that might come up throughout my research. The two texts have already been a strong entry-point for theorising my experiential knowledge and can provide the framework for exploring how gender binary influence listening and sound creation.

LISTENING

For this section, I am going to create several Listening prompts. With each prompt I would like to navigate through, unpack and question concepts such as natural, artificial, male, female, human, animal. With these experiments I want to invite the reader -and myself- to reflect on how both of us signify what we hear depending on cultural and political ideas of animacies; how these ideas can influence the filtering of our listening attention; and in which scenarios pleasure and noise are related to ideology. The creation of these prompts will evolve throughout my sound project and research, as well as from my own agency around sound and embodiment.

Example Use the freesound.org library (Freesound.org, 2011) to search for sounds with the entry word "natural". Listen to as many sounds of your choice as you want. What is "natural" in each sound that you just listened to?

SOUND RECORDING

This section will evolve as a diary of my thoughts on sound recording; which sounds I would like to preserve for my graduation project, how I can avoid sound capturing and what will be my position on sampling external sounds- sounds that other people have made. On sampling as a political act, I am already strongly influenced by Leichti's book This track contains politics (Liechti, 2022), an ethnographic publication on contemporary electroninc pop music sampling.

The legal problem with stealing someone's voice usually emerges when this entity owns copyrights. This idea came to me, while I was reading the following excerpt from freesound.org on the section What sounds are legal to put on freesound? ; "What is legal, you ask? Well, you could record street noise, birds, an overhead airplane, a faucet running, a door slamming, a siren, a car alarm, .... So many sounds are not from a source which has copyright on the sound. Most of the time only human-made sounds can be copyrighted! And even when they are human made (say, protesters in the street, or a street vendor) you can get away with uploading them to freesound." (Freesound.org, 2013)

What happens with all the bodies and entities that don't own citizenship? Why sounds from public protests and street vendors can get away with uploading at freesound? Is copyright synonymous with consent?

EDITING STRATEGIES

As I already mentioned in my graduation proposal, sound editing can be seen as a decision making process of frequencies modulation. For this section I will gather the discrete editing strategies that I will develop during my graduation project. This chapter will evolve in parallel with my sound processing practices. It will be a reflection over situated gestures of alteration on specific samples. I see it as a try-out for conscious editing, in order to break down automated aesthetic decisions and relate sound editing to my research question. Each strategy can be connected to gestures of empowerment, transformation, shrinking, muting and will be motivated by my embodied position towards a sound.

SOUND JAMS DOCUMENTATION

This chapter will be a documentation of the sound jams that I am going to co-facilitate with Ål Nik throughout the year and will embody parts of my ongoing sound research. The documentation will include: the preparation of the jam -the specific question connected to my research that is going to be tested out each time and the restrictions that emerge from that question; my thoughts and feelings throughout the collective facillitation and sound making journey; the thoughts and feelings of Ål and of the rest sound co-creators.

Conclusion

For the conclusion I will recapitulate the theories, strategies, thoughts, prompts, experiences, documentation that I produced throughout the chapters, in order to answer the research question that I raised in the introduction.

Anotated Bibliography

Animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect by Mel Y. Chen (Chen, 2012) Animacy is a linguistic term that is connected with liveliness, agency, awareness, mobility. It is cast out as a spell to human and non-human bodies and objects, creating categories of value among them. What is animate and inanimate is constantly under negotiation. Animacy hierarchies are biopolitically produced by notions of citizenship, race, sex, ability and sexuality.

Counter-sexual Manifesto by Paul B. Preciado (Preciado, Kevin Gerry Dunn and Halberstam, 2018)

Introducing the dildo as an apparatus for deconstructing gender and sexual difference, approaching critically the "biological truths" that frame living bodies. Genitals are considered as biopolitical apparatuses. Sex is read as a technology. The book is constructed through a manifesto, three counter-sexual exercises for generating dildos, theories around how the technology of the dildo can subvert the naturalisation of heteronosexuality, the genealogy of sex toys, the historicity of the western standardisation of gender, the fabrication of living bodies through technologies and a series of counter-sexual reading exercises.

Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown (brown, 2019)

Pleasure activism is about "making the revolution irresistible". About embodying social change through pleasure. Pleasure activism learns from somatics, a perception of body, mind and spirit as united, a collective practice of understanding trauma and pain. Erotic is connected to political and community care is central to activism. The book is consisted of interviews and texts around the author's pleasure activism lineage, poetry and artworks around radical sex, a chronicle of sexual experiences and pleasure as a political practice.

Shell Song by Everest Pipkin (shell-song.neocities.org, 2020)

A website that host the vocal and textual narration of a trans man, who gave his voice to Librivox before his transition. His voice through copyright policy got later used for AI training. This narration is an entanglement of thoughts around his own voice dysphoria journey, the materiality of a living body's voice, its restoration as a body capture, the politics of AI voice sampling around standardising gender - binary frequencies, the framing of "pleasant" voices and establishing low wages or forced labor for its creation.

This track may contain politics by Hannes Liechti (Liechti, 2022)

An ethnographic approach on the political motives of contemporary electronic music sampling, through referring to several case studies of less famous producers' tracks. This book focuses on the sampling of political material and the sampling as an activist action. From the author: "In this book, I argue that analysis of the culture of sampling is one possible way to access particular narratives of this world. The inclusion of external music, environmental noises, or found media material brings the world into popular music tracks in a condensed form.[...] Every process of sampling represents a complex net of contexts, meanings, choices, creative decisions, and musical strategies. In-depth analysis of such processes and their socio-cultural ramifications means revealing and interpreting this net as far as possible." (Liechti, 2022, p. 10)

Some of the tracks that the books refers to: Lara Sarkisian - Kenats --> altering synth melody as a traditional gender role critique
https://soundcloud.com/larasarkissian/kenats?in=evolution-fan/sets/warm-water (soundcloud.com, 2016.) One Pig from Mathew Herbert--> processed sounds from a pig's life to criticise globalised food industry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOyllh4UG-U&list=OLAK5uy_mV2FXXq-jjLswh4ErmxpuRt8utltd3uIE (www.youtube.com, 2015.)

Reference list

brown, a.m, 2019. Pleasure activism : the politics of feeling good. Chico, Ca: Ak Press
Chen, M.Y., 2012. Animacies : biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Durham, Nc: Duke University Press.
Freesound.org., 2011. Freesound - Freesound. [online] Available at: https://freesound.org[Accessed 17 Nov. 2022].
Liechti, H., 2022. This Track Contains Politics. Bern: Norient Books
Preciado, P.B., Kevin Gerry Dunn and Halberstam, J., 2018. Countersexual Manifesto. New York, Ny: Columbia University Press.
shell-song.neocities.org., 2020. Shell Song. [online] Available at: https://shell-song.neocities.org/# [Accessed 8 Nov. 2022].
soundcloud.com., 2016. Lara Sarkissian - kenats. [online] Available at: https://soundcloud.com/larasarkissian/kenats?in=evolution-fan/sets/warm-water [Accessed 18 Nov. 2022].
www.youtube.com., 2015. August 2009. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOyllh4UG-U&list=OLAK5uy_mV2FXXq-jjLswh4ErmxpuRt8utltd3uIE [Accessed 18 Nov. 2022].
Gannon, S., 2017. 'Autoethnography'. Centre for Educational Research (SoE).

Bibliography

Haraway, D.J., 1988. 'Situated knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective'. Centre for Educational Research (SoE). Vol. 14. No. 3. pp. 575-599
Haraway, D.J., 1991. Simians, cyborgs, and women : the reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.
Mathieu, W.A., 2011. The listening book : discovering your own music. Boston: Shambhala.
Oliveros, P., 2005. Deep listening : a composer’s sound practice. New York: Universe.
Preciado, P.B., 2020. APARTMENT ON URANUS : chronicles of the crossing. S.L.: Semiotext(E.
Wishart, T. and Emmerson, S., 2002. On sonic art. London: Routledge.
Wishart, T., 2019. Red Bird: A Political Prisoner’s Dream. [Vinyl, LP, Stereo] London: ICR DISTRIBUTION. Available at: https://icrdistribution.bandcamp.com/track/red-bird [Accessed 8 Nov. 2022].