Feminised Noise and the ‘Dotted Line’ of Sonic Experimentalism

Abstract

This article outlines various intersections of noise and femininity, through which noise has been feminised and the feminine has been produced as noisy. Feminised musical genres, such as mainstream pop, have been dismissed as excessive, banal and extraneous noise. Noise has also been feminised by a number of recent historiographical and curatorial projects that have sought to amplify the creative work of women in experimental and electronic music. Using a cybernetic understanding of noise as an explanatory metaphor, I suggest that these projects threaten the integrity of a patrilineal 'dotted line' that characterises histories of musical noise and sonic experimentalism. This cybernetic metaphor is also applied to Pauline Oliveros' Willowbrook generations and reflections (1976) and the performances of noise artist Phantom Chips, so as to identify the production of a feminised noise in and through music. I suggest that these curatorial projects and musical practices raise important questions as to if, when and how feminised noise becomes feminist noise.Keywords: Noise; Gender; Feminism; Sonic Arts; Experimental Music; CyberneticsIn September 2014, a YouTube video of Courtney Love went viral. The video shows Love's band, Hole, performing their hit Celebrity skin at a show in New York four years earlier. The audio that accompanies the video, however, does not sound right at all--it sounds (and is intended to be heard as) 'bad'. The video shows the whole band playing but what we hear is, allegedly, Love's isolated guitar and vocal tracks. The guitar playing sounds particularly 'off': it is out of tune and out of time. The audio was supposedly leaked by a sound engineer who had been hired to record the show but had not been paid (Ladd, 2014). This 'shaming' YouTube video was met with sneering, mockery and performative outrage. Love's vocals and guitar playing were described in the media as 'cringey ' (Huffington Post Canada, 2014), 'even worse than you'd imagine ' (Ozzi, 2014) and 'horrible', 'truly awful' (McGinley, 2014).The leaked audio and subsequent reactions exemplify how female artists are often received, particularly when playing with instruments or in musical genres coded as 'male' or 'masculine'. As Gibsone notes, isolated performances of female musicians--from Linda McCartney to Taylor Swift--are often leaked with the intention of exposing them as frauds. Male artists, by comparison, are rarely exposed in the same way; and if they are, they rarely generate the same reaction (Gibsone, 2014). Perhaps less obviously, the video and the reactions to it also serve as a reminder of the ways in which 'feminised' speech, sounds and music-making are often equated with noise, whether the term is understood as extraneous, unwanted, unpleasant, dis-ruptive or meaningless sound (Carson, 1992;James, 2015;Thompson, 2013). Love's performance appears to fail as music, and so the video is a testament to Love's apparent 'failure' as an artist. The (intended) reception of the video invokes the notion of noise as 'sound out of p...

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