Languages of Listening: In the Wolf Thickes

In the Wolf Thickets:
Gendered Sounds, Gendered Contexts

…all around reverberates the otherworldly echo of women’s awful yearly shrieking.
(Alkaios of Lesbos, cited in Carson, 1995, p. 123)

In the Wolf Thickets is a piece of sonic ficto-criticism exploring gender and sound—who is allowed make noise and what are the acceptable formats for doing so. The piece utilises three writing strategies, operating as parallel strands that can be read in any order. The first is a speculative fiction scenario, presented as an audio work, which depicts an alternate future where female-identified artists dominate the experimental music environment. It playfully explores the way in which this might have come about and how culture might adapt to such a change. *This sound work was originally written for the interactive installation Sounding the Future. The historical and personal anecdote strands have been added during my PhD research to create this ficto-critical module. This speculuative scenario was actually inspired by Anne Carson’s “The Gender of Sound” (1995), which reflects on how women’s “sounding” was marginalised in the times of the Ancient Greeks. The second stream explores these and other rich ideas.

The third strand comprises biographical notes on the development of my practice as a sound artist. By utilising fiction, historical/theoretical analysis and personal anecdote, the intention is to explore the idea of sound, gender and control across the past, present and future, encouraging contrasts and resonances between them. The ficto-critical approach used has strong roots in feminist writing as it allows for complex subjectivities and a plurality of perspectives that challenge the de-personalised “universal” (presumed male) voice of traditional academic discourse. Delivered as an online work that allows for audio, it explores the issue of gender inequality in experimental music while simultaneously enacting a feminist “sounding” space.
Headphone listening recommended.

[Transcript]

Back then there were XX sounds,
though the loudest still hard to hear
over the dominant roar of the XY.
Eventually perceived as a problem,
places set aside
to allow the XX to sound out,
gather density and volume.

This segregation satisfied no-one,
the clipped-wing
of classification and containment
reminiscent of domestication.

And caught in a media cycle
of “Little-Mis[s]-representation”
the seen always dominated the heard
(her dress received louder than her noise).

The reasons for this were
— complicated
— historic
— embedded
— engrained
— their own fault?

A blend of the above.

Things shifted slowly,
but not at the rate of change
of all other aspects of the 21st Century.
It would perhaps still be the same today,
had it not been for The Syndrome.

In her essay “The Gender of Sound” (1995), poet and classics scholar Anne Carson interrogates the differences between male and female soundings as depicted in Ancient Greek writings.

She refers to a poem by the exiled ancient Alkaios, who is forced to live on the far outskirts of a city, which he describes as the wolf thickets. Here he pines for the ordered sounds of the Assembly and the company and legitimacy of men. Instead of the measured murmurs of male speech, in which restraint is prized and paramount, here amongst these women, on the margins of society, he must endure the shrieks, wailing and ululation specific to women’s rituals. This shriek is called an ololyga, and these activities can only take place away from the “civil society” of males.

I was a good girl. I went to church and sang in the choir. I begged to have singing lessons even though the teacher said I was too young. But I stopped them after a year or so because I didn’t like the stuffy, boring music. It was also because, although I had no words for it at the time, I didn’t want the natural “grain of the voice” trained out of me (Barthes, 1977). Perhaps there was also an element of self-realisation in which I knew I was never going to be a “proper” singer. I could never completely trust my voice not to betray me.
[Transcript]

Marianna looks out at the crowd,
most with eyes closed,
moving their heads
in figures of eight,
playing with the angle
of ears to wave.

Marianna is playing first tonight at Ololyga’s,
the venue behind the nondescript door,
down the lane, off the side-street,
in the suburb a few too many away from the centre.

She drew the short straw.
No headliner hierarchies here —
an unwritten rule that keeps
egos in check and genre battles gentle.

Marianna is playing herself.
She taps her source,
her body the feed —
lets her program sort patterns
and then she tweaks the results.
The thump of heart and flow of blood
become the base of tidal surges
and sucking undertows.
The movement of joint and bone,
finger and limb,
creates tectonic upheaval.
The zing of scheming neurons,
the cracksnaphisspop of electricity.

Bringing the inside out —
this is the noise of women.
Before they had
the wail and the shriek,
now the whole being
can be sourced and revealed
and turned inside out into song.

Marianna feels good.
Her pulse increasing,
beat responding,
waves breaking,
sound peaking,
then it’s flatline sine
as she pulls the plug.
Marianna looks out at the applauding crowd
and it’s 90% female.

Every sound we make is a bit of autobiography. It has a private interior yet its trajectory is public. A piece of inside projected to the outside. The censorship of such projections is a task of patriarchal culture that (as we have seen) divides humanity into two species: those who can censor themselves and those who cannot.
(Carson, 1995, p. 130)

According to Euripides, the female has no control and all manner of emotions “come up to her mouth and out through her tongue” (in Carson, 1995, p. 126). Male sonic virtue comes from the fact that he possesses logos (reason and knowledge) that is mediated through sophrosyne (considered speech). Women lacked the “ordering principle of sophrosyne”. The notion of female sophrosyne Carson says is “coextensive with female obedience to male direction and rarely means more than chastity” (p. 126).

Carson notes that in Ancient Greece and Rome it was commonly thought that the genitals were directly connected to the vocal cords. It was believed that a woman’s voice would drop and her neck thicken once she lost her virginity (p. 133). Women were dissuaded from undertaking vocal exercises as it was thought it would make them infertile, while men were encouraged in vocal practice as a cure for all manner of physical and psychological complaints. A woman was believed to have two mouths over which she had little control, while the male’s vocal cords were directly connected to the testicles in a kind of tensioning arrangement (pp. 119–120).

In a brief diversion from the Ancients, Carson tells of Ernest Hemingway’s decision to cease his friendship with Gertrude Stein after he overheard her pleading, in a girlish voice, with her lover. Presumably this was a tone he could not reconcile with her more public sounding voice, which one biographer compared to a beefsteak. This shift in dignity, expressed through vocal tone, is presumably something he could not unhear. (Carson, 1995, p. 121–122).

This reminds me of a story Laurie Anderson tells on her album, The Ugly One with the Jewels (1995) in which she listens to some nuns saying grace over pizza and muses as to why women’s voices become higher when they are asking for things, “especially from men”.

At acting school I was consistently told that my voice was too high. That this 18-year-old should sound as smoke-and-whiskey hoarse as Hemingway with a hangover.

There was the unspoken implication from my acting teachers that once I got a good fucking my voice would lose its girlish fragility. Such was the pressure that it was well known amongst the cohort who were the virgin girls, and over the three years of our training, our various deflowerings were publicly noted.

However, at acting school I also discovered Brecht, and after exposure to Lotte Lenya and Dagmar Krause, I decided my voice was good enough, if contained to a musical shout below the break. So in the ’90s I performed my own songs, yelling and yowling my outrage at what it was like to be a woman in her early 20s, routinely harassed and heartbroken, delivered with a liberal dash of stand-up comedy to confound the cliché of the humourless angry feminist.

At the time, none of us dared sing above the break, except to exploit it for a Björk-like yodel, our riot grrl yells an attempt to beat the bravado at its own game. If you did use your high, light, songbird sound you were immediately compared with Kate Bush (who fell into the mad witch cliché), because mainstream culture only had room for one successful pop soprano.
[Transcript]

Ivana looks out at the crowd
and it’s 90% female.

She takes that statistic,
along with many others
and manifests them
into her Sonic Social Demography,
mapping the shifts,
riding the curves and crashes.

She hopes to find answers
in the patterns and flows.
To hear what, so far,
has not been seen.

This is the sound of politics,
and the politics of sound.

Of course, music has always been political —
back before, the mainstream a major cog
in the machinations of the
military industrial entertainment complex.
Opiates and aphrodisiacs,
keep them moving to the beat.

But now that only half the numbers
are susceptible,
the music machine’s half as useful.
Deemed a woman’s act
music is tolerated,
but not encouraged.

So, on its last legs,
a marginal mainstream
slides into the darkness of a
catacombic underground.

Welcome to Ololyga’s.

Greek women of the archaic and classical periods were not encouraged to pour forth unregulated cries of any kind within the civic space of the polis or within earshot of men.
(Carson, 1995, p. 126)

The rituals of women took place on the outskirts of the cities, on the edges of the wilderness, on the margins. Woman as wild child, untrainable animal. Carson breaks down the etymology of the term ololyga to its onomatopoeic roots—eleleu and alala—sounds that cannot be tamed by the semantics so prized by the men. These cries of sacrifice, ritual and childbirth posed a direct challenge to a world of well-ordered words (p. 125).

In the early 2000s I started making experimental electronic music and I made a conscious decision to not use my voice, despite it being my primary instrument and way of understanding music to date. Partly this was because I needed a clean break from all the ways I had made music before. It was also because, at that time, the few females in the experimental scene often used vocals and it was all too easily seen as the women’s way of engaging with experimental practice. In the Sydney scene, there was an unspoken agreement that the voice was not really welcome. It was too raw, too fleshy, too uncooked to sit alongside the man-machine grit and hum that was the sound of the hour.
[Transcript]

Jones looks up at the stage
and it’s 100% female,
the crowd five men to 45 women.

Not that men aren't allowed,
just some come to make trouble
and Bertha the Bouncer is pretty formidable.

No matter how much subsidised sport,
avatar porn and comedy galas they’re given,
some men still believe:
“if I can’t have it, no one can.”

And things are getting a lttle more serious.
Every century, it seems, breeds a whack-cult
ready to call for a “witch burning”
with access to governmental ears.

But Jones comes here often,
he’s “OK”. A fan-boy.
Well, if that’s what they think,
he doesn’t mind so much.
He just feels lucky
he’s one of the remaining —
the 15% who can still feel the music

PROFOUND AUDITORY AGNOSIA SYNDROME (PAAS)
Affecting 85% of the XY population, 0.5% effect on XX population, though it is strongly believed XX carry the as-yet unidentified mutation.

Cause unknown but strong evidence points to over exposure to radio frequencies which reached peak bandwidth saturation in the mid 21st century.

The hearing mechanism remains fully functional with the subject able to understand and produce speech and accept causal relationship of action to sounds, if the action is visible. However, in the absence of any visual signifier, the subject is unable to identify a sound disconnected from its source, nor make sense of patterning, pitch or rhythmic formulations.

The subject feels NO affect from any form of audible construction.

Jones feels extra lucky,
he’s an even rarer case.
He can actually try to make music.

Those XY who can are quite shy,
taking time to emerge
from their bedroom experimentations,
first seeking audience
via gender-blind subscription streams.

Jones has been making for a while
and last week put himself forward
for Ololyga’s Open Night.

A disjunctive collage style,
approximating, he imagines,
the meaningless jumble
of a PAAS sufferer.

It felt good.
It felt weird,
expectation and judgment
a loose noose that could tighten anytime.

Marianna was encouraging:
“take it further” she advised.
Ivana dissected his motivations
over vodkas until three in the morning.
He almost felt accepted.

Tonight the audience's XY stats are up by one,
as he has come with this guy called Simon.
Simon started working at the café
Jones cooks at.
Most men give you a hard time

but Simon seemed interested,
kept asking…
so tonight Jones is introducing him to Ololyga’s.

But these women’s rituals, taking place on the edges, Carson tells us, serve not just the women but are rituals undertaken on behalf of the city. It is the women’s role to express the emotions that are kept restrained; the women’s role to mourn, or summon, or scare away. In the ritual of Choes a woman must undertake symbolic, or perhaps real, sex with Dionysus in order to cleanse the community and, in the words of Demosthenes, “discharge the unspeakable things on behalf of the community” (in Carson, 1995, pp. 132–133). While being outcast, the women are still serving the citizens.

My voice crept back in. At first it was heavily disguised, appearing only in recorded compositions, but then later live, processed and partially recognisable. After the first time I performed live vocal processing, a senior male artist approached me and said, “That thing with the voice—don’t do that”. He was right in that it wasn’t working yet, but having a practice means just that—practising, and in this scene it means learning on the job. While a little mortified, I didn’t take his advice. Now my voice, wordless and slippery in its transformations and improvisations, has primary place in my music—it defines my sound.
[Transcript]

Ada abhors a crowd
and plays in a small, soundproofed booth
out the back.
Each audience of one receives
a 7-minute session of sonic acupuncture.

Tiny sounds.
Some sting like insect bites.
Others twinge like a nerve pinch.
Some burn like a wax drop.
All sharp, psychic shocks,
to zap the synapses.
Ada is a nerve-core artist.

Some nerve-corists
set up treatment clinics,
call themselves practitioners,
but Ada fights that fem-nurturer paradigm.
For her it’s about the aesthetics and affect…
She wants to blow minds,
not cauterise them.

As she’s powering down her gear
this guy Simon reappears,
had a session an hour ago,
wants to say how amazing it was.

She thanks him,
and moves towards the door
which he’s blocking…
which he’s now closing behind him…
now advancing towards her,
scanner in hand,
taking her measure,
pressing her back into the chair.

As she protests
he explains—
They’ve been watching.
There is potential.
Her techniques
might be useful,
reactivate, rehabilitate,
cure even.

They’ve realigned priorities
to make it seem like they don’t care.
But this inequality,
well it’s just not fair…
unacceptable.
Her cooperation will be rewarded,
or it will be forced.

As he firmly guides
her into the back seat
of the black car
in the lane,
he leans in and whispers:
“After all, is it not your duty
To redress the imbalance?”

Afterword
I was taught that objective reportage of academic questions is the ideal form for scholarship to take, but in pursuing scholarship myself I never found that possible. I could never think without thinking about myself thinking. And I’m not sure if that’s a casualty of being me or of being human, so I decided to assume the latter. So my scholarship, such as it is, is intensely subjective. But because I am aware of this as a problem, I make an attempt to continually bridge the gap between that subjective self and the reader. Although it’s a private vision, it also brings the reader into its vision from time to time. (Carson in Aitken, 2004, para 160)

Afterthought

I often, self-deprecatingly, refer to my work as Enya with noise. For my generation the Enya reference indicates my utter “uncoolness”. For a more recent generation, the ethereal Celtic songbird’s image has been repatriated somewhat. But I still can’t quite bring myself to deal with lyrics, to allow signifiers to be conveyed through the vehicle of my voice. I’m not sure if it’s a fear of saying too much, or too little.

Instead, I’ve been playing with a synthetic version of myself—compiled from around an hour’s worth of reading out loud. My hope is that, with the critical distance of mediation, I might be able to say things through my synthetically othered voice that I can’t bring myself to say acoustically. If the notion of voicing is already a mediation of the inside coming out, this is mediation squared. My intention is to use this voice in a reboot of my performance mode “Watch Me Type”, (see Module (i): Listening to My Listening – Practice Notes.) Whether it’s an act of cowardice, self-preservation or a strategic adaptation to a new post-human potential is yet to be decided.
References

Aitken, W. (2004). Anne Carson, The art of poetry no. 88. The Paris Review, 171 Fall. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/anne-carson-the-art-of-poetry-no-88-anne-carson

Anderson, L. (1995). Maria Teresa Teresa Maria—Live: The ugly one with the jewels and other stories [Album]. Warner Bros.

Barthes, R. (1977). The grain of the voice. In Image—music—text (S. Heath, Trans.) (pp. 179–189). Hill & Wang.

Carson, A. (1995). The Gender of sound. In Glass, irony and God (pp. 119–142). New Directions.

Priest, G. (2017). Sounding the future [Interactive installation]. http://www.soundingthefuture.com

In the Wolf Thickets: Gendered Sounds, Gendered Contexts

References

In the Wolf Thickets:
Gendered Sounds, Gendered Contexts