Conference Agenda

In the past decade, hyperpop has emerged as a musical genre that is associated with maximalist electronic soundscapes and vocal processing. LGBTQ+ identifying musicians and listeners gather online (Discord, Twitch) and in-person (music concerts) to create a rich subculture where electronic pop music is celebrated. Hyperpop’s mediation through social media, music streaming platforms, and online music journalism has indexed this practice as a style. Importantly, the technologically-processed voice (largely consisting of pitched-up vocals and pitch correction) is commonly understood as a technique utilized by trans-feminine musicians in order to expand their self expression. In addition to attending to the potentially empowering aspects of processed vocals for transgender and non-binary artists, I argue that such voices should be contextualized amongst the broader material technologies and social experiences in which they are produced and performed.

Drawing on interviews with musicians Katie Dey, Claire Rousay, and Sami Perez, and on recent trans of color scholarship’s attention towards the complexity of self-formation, this paper aims to theorize the processed voice’s cultural context through tracing its technological, musical, and affective materiality. Musicologist M. Myrta Leslie Santana’s research shows how Western gender identity categories do not capture the everyday, lived experience of developing one’s sense of self, especially as it is constructed through race, class, and gender. Additionally, musicologist Dana Baitz posits that one of the key differences between cis queer and trans experiences is that trans musicians are not transgressing social norms, and in fact, they are materially investing in bodily transformation. I build on this work by examining the ways musicians negotiate a relationship between voice and self through practices that draw from tools (pitch and formant shifting plug-in KeroVee and pitch correction software Melodyne), communities (online and in-person), and their unique social positionality.

Music of the current moment increasingly utilizes technologically-processed vocals, necessitating the development of musicological scholarship that culturally situates trans experiences ​​vis-à-vis sound and voice. Associating the processed voice with identity categories only engages with a surface-level understanding of gender. Situating the aforementioned musicians’ perspectives within a theoretical underpinning of gender and technology studies scholarship, this paper uncovers the complex conditions that are involved in the production of voices, and suggests a conceptualization of gender that attends to technologically-driven musical practice.

The title of this paper is named after Henri René’s Music for the Weaker Sex (RCA, 1958). The album cover features an attractive young white woman in a nightgown surrounded by sheet music. Her arms are raised above her head in a frontal pose which frames and emphasizes her face and breasts. Throughout the 1950s images like this of half-clothed or negligée clad women positioned to signify sexual availability increased to the point that in 1957 the New York Times noted “mood music had demonstrably become nude music.” Music for the Weaker Sex was only one of the many mood albums during this period that used female bodies, emotions, and desires as a central theme in not only the title and album cover art, but the musical conception as well.

My paper examines how gender served as an organizing principle in 1950s mood albums through the material and historical specificity of recordings that portrayed women as either inert objects or emotional, even exotic, subjects: Les Baxter’s The Passions featuring Bas Sheva (1953), Jackie Gleason’s Music to Change Her Mind (1953), and Music for the Weaker Sex (1958). Initial reactions to these albums might focus on how they objectify women, reinforce gender norms, or cater to the male gaze. What is not apparent is how these albums reveal the social and historical conditions of women’s experiences in a system dominated by men. To examine this I draw on recent scholarship in music and literature which theorizes “genre worlds” as active processes of organizing social knowledges (Brackett 2016; Jerng 2019), and feminist research methods that pay attention to the gradual gender activism of ordinary and underrepresented women (Nicholson 2013; Thompson 2013). Mood albums have historically fallen under the category of “bland” easy listening, a type of music that has eluded critical analysis for far too long. These albums offer a rich site for exploring postwar musical arrangements, public discourses around female sexuality, and how some of the women involved in their production challenged notions of womanhood in unforeseen ways.

Sounds of effort—grunts, groans, gasps, and moans—are considered transgressive, especially when they appear on classical recordings. Somaesthetics allows a reclamation of these vocalizations as music. At present, the classical recording industry aims to project an image of instrumentalists as poised, non-sweaty, and corporeally silent. An imbalance is made plain: composers are free to notate whatever sounds they wish, while performers are discouraged from voicing performative effort. The century-long practice of admonishing musicians for making so-called ‘extraneous noises’ has established unspoken norms encouraging interpreters to make their physical presence as inconspicuous as possible. Critiques of sounded effort are applied unequally: women receive harsh criticism for audibly breathing, while men who moan loudly are lauded for being so ‘connected’ to the music. Classical performance thereby parallels professional tennis, where grunts have undergone a similar reckoning. In both fields, the transgressive nature of effortful vocalizing has been linked to sounds associated with sex, prompting biased critiques that run along lines of race and gender.

Countering these punitive appraisals, I employ Inclusive Track Analysis—a methodology drawn from my book Sounds as They Are (Oxford University Press 2023)—to create an accommodating typology of audible exertions. One category, associated with climactic utterances, is illustrated in recordings by Janine Jansen, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Pablo Casals, and Fazıl Say. A second category, associated with ongoing exertion, is found in tracks by Claire Chase, Evgeny Kissin, and Giambattista Valdettaro. Allyson Nadia Field’s ‘archive of absence’ is brought to bear on the scandalous erasure of grunts in recordings by Joyce Hatto.