Recalibrating Fundamentals of Discipline and Desire Through the Automatic Music Tent

Abstract

This paper considers the role that discourses of fundamental acoustic parameters, in particular pitch and timbre, have played in the reproduction of a significantly (male) gendered digital music landscape in and beyond the UK. By revisiting a nineteenth-century debate about the definition of tone, which occurred between Georg Simon Ohm and August Seebeck, the paper exposes some of the ways that these foundational audio-technical discourses have been articulated through implicitly gendered, sexualised and racialised discourses. Certain ways in which these discourses have been performed differently are then addressed through Kim Gordon's and Jutta Koether's installation, Reverse karaoke: Automatic music tent (2005), which establishes a creative space where performing and listening function as social events that are transmitted along a specifically queer feminist frequency.

Keywords:

• Pitch
• Timbre
• Race
• Gender
• Sexuality
• Queer Feminist Performativity

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] Indeed, such a turn was later taken up in timbral and post-tonal musics, gaining a particularly nuanced expression through jazz, avant-garde rock and post-punk musics of the twentieth century, contributing, for example, to the sound of Sonic Youth’s guitar tunings as well as their use of power chords and distortion (Walser, 1993).

[2] Huffer has criticised dominant readings in queer theory that take Foucault’s assertion at face value as a ‘drastic simplification of what Foucault is actually saying in the paragraph’ (2010, pp. 68, 70). In making this point, she highlights an important element of irony—one that has often been missed within such readings—embedded in Foucault’s critique of a subject governed by sexuality.

[3] ‘Heteronormativity’, Berlant and Warner write,

is more than ideology, or prejudice, or phobia against gays and lesbians; it is produced in almost every aspect of the forms and arrangements of social life: nationality, the state, and the law; commerce; medicine; and education; as well as in the conventions and affects of narrativity, romance, and other protected spaces of culture. (1998, pp. 554–555)

[4] For a more extended reading, see Ingleton (2015).

[5] The Her Noise project and archive were commissioned in 2005 by co-curators Lina Džuverović and Anne Hilde Neset and were intended to ‘investigate music and sound histories in relation to gender and to bring together a wide network of women artists who use sound as a medium’ (http://www.electra-productions.com/projects/2005/her_noise/overview.shtml). See also Lane’s chapter, this volume.

[6] The discourses that connect ‘woman’ with lack have a long and contentious history, whether addressed as Lacanian lack, Kristevan abjection or, in Freudian theory, female sexuality as the embodiment of lack and loss: ‘She is left with a void, a lack of all representation, re-presentation, and even strictly speaking of all mimesis of her desire for origin’ (Irigaray, 1985, pp. 41–42).

[7] I am not suggesting that a performance such as this one can ‘undo’ the dominance of whiteness. I am proposing that whiteness is itself a performance, and not a ‘natural’ fact. What this points to also is the unshakable privilege of whiteness, such that even when performed badly, no matter how bad ‘white’ is, it still occupies a position of racial privilege.