Abstract

Voicing Up was created as short sound piece accompaniment to a performative presentation of research at Sonic Cyberfeminisms at Lincoln University in May 2017. The interview based research was a result of investigating how women* artists of colour working in electronic music in Berlin practice empowerment, survival and resistance. Composed as a basic collage and intentionally using sounds made available under creative commons zero license, the piece serves as an introduction or even summary of the thoughts and topics expressed in the performative presentation, and therefore by the interviewees. The piece begins and end, respectively, with the sounds of an opening and closing laptop and incorporates a dominant heartbeat which eventually gives way to a money counting machine. Voicing Up interweaves sounds from two main narrative groupings - household appliances and hand held tools. In this way the piece offers a simple audio interpretation of the struggles faced by the artists I interviewed, including a lack of resources, acceptance and support, a desire to create new (digital) spaces in which to survive and work, and a growing sense of exhaustion. For Out of Space? the research was presented in an informal, almost radio show format with interspersed songs. For the Paragrana Publication the ideas are presented in a form of a conversation with Holger Schulze.

Audio