Dr. Alexandria Smith, professor of Project Studio: Gender in Electronic Music

About

Project Studio Music Technology: Gender in Electronic Music is an exploration and celebration of female-identifying, trans, and non-binary composers/producers, performers, researchers, instrument designers, and sound artists that have impacted the history and production of electronic music. This course is designed to immerse students in the process of critical listening and critical making while engaging with the historical, sociological, and technological dimensions inherent in the narratives of these artists. All of the pieces tonight are based off of artists and researchers that we have studied throughout the course.

fear tone (2024) - Mir Jeffres 
With this piece, I wanted to explore Maryanne Amacher's concept of "ear tone" music. Her "ear tones" were sounds generated by beat frequencies (also called combination or difference tones) as well as otoacoustic emissions (OAEs), which are tones generated in the inner ear in response to external sound stimulus. The piece aims to make the audience think more about how they hear - listen to the different frequencies in the room around you. What sounds really exist and which are generated in your head? The tones played from the speakers are chosen from the performer's brain wave frequency bands (delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma) which range from 0.5 to 50 Hz. As the performer tries to settle into one brain state, the audience hears the difference tones and OAEs shift in their own brains.

A Prelude to the Cyborg Cistern (2024) - Karn Watcharasupat (กานต์ วัชระสุภัทร)

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a DAW's slides, no escape from reality.

Karn Watcharasupat (กานต์ วัชระสุภัทร) --- and simultaneously but less commonly known so, Ng Su Yi (黄株绮) --- is currently a PhD student at the Music Informatics Group working at the intersection of music and machine learning --- the thing she and her advisor will sometimes begrudgingly refer to as AI. She is not here today not because she is sleep deprived, although she is, but because she is at a conference in Korea, and technology has not yet allowed her to be in a quantum superposition state or to turn herself into a cyborg.

Her work "A Prelude to the Cyborg Cistern" invites the listener to engage in listening to multiple simultaneous, perhaps cyborg, realities of a physical euphonium performance by human processed through a DAW, and a virtual euphonium performance processed from real human-performed samples, situated in the same cistern where Oliveros and the rest of the Deep Listening Band immersed in the almost minute-long reverberations. Is the sound of the physical euphonium processed through a DAW more cyborg than the virtual instrument that consists of heavily processed sounds from a once-real euphonium? Is this rendition of Bach Cello Etude switched on or switched off? Where in this piece will you choose to put your attention into? It's your turn, fellow cyborgs.

Music of the Spheres (1938) - Johanna Magdalena Beyer 

Performed by Nicolette Cash, Dani Leinwander, and Levi Waterhouse on individually designed Electronic Software Instruments.  

For our experimental creative project, we are exploring the threshold between dexterity and virtuosity. Taking inspiration from the snare drum, as a very simple analog instrument, we each built a virtual music program using a keyboard, and mouse for one performer, as controllers. We utilize these hardware components for their understandable and accessible affordances, while programming virtuosity into the software instruments by encouraging the performers to explore the creative breadth of their systems. Each performer plays one part from the Music of the Spheres trio with their music system, comprised of controller and music program. 

Healing Wounds (2024) – Chaeryong Oh and J.F. Nation.

Inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa's poem Healing Wounds, this song draws upon the pain of sharing dual identities among those who live at La Frontera (Borderlands). Self-described as a "chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer, and cultural theorist", Anzaldúa's works highlight how intersections of sexuality, gender, culture, and language can restrict identities, resulting in separate embodied selves. These selves, seen as wounds here, are inflicted by others, and often we must choose between reconciling them or maintaining face(s) for self, kin, and strangers. The second verse elaborates on my experience of how the voice - a necessity for expression - can act as one of these wounds, as metal vocals are heavily masculine-coded, forcing me to choose between my artistic performance ideals and my nonbinary gender identity. To extract my voice from singing, I employ the use of a modified Aztec Death Whistle. The backing track was composed entirely using MIDI instruments.

The VJ's performance references Korean shamanism, inspired by Lakota Indigenous artist Suzanne Kite's Listener(2018), the science fictional performance weaving technology into Lakota ontology. Kite uses Lakota stories, visuals, and symbols with present technologies to show how the future will look through Lakota women's lens. The visual refers to the imaginary flower garden, Seocheon Kkotbat(서천 꽃밭), which bridges life and death, as described in Korean shamanism. Psychedelic shader-coded visuals show how the flower field would look if a Korean nonbinary person managed it.

Braids (2024) - Brittney Allen 

BRAIDS_ is an interactive system that allows users to explore their musical creativity via an abstraction of the Black American hair braiding tradition. By weaving conductive strands through capacitive cores, users can "play" with braids as if they're expressive musical instruments.