Conference Agenda

For decades, electronic music artists have technologically manipulated their voices to blur partitions between organic human and synthetic “other.” As technology progresses and becomes increasingly accessible, opportunities arise where organic and synthetic boundaries are further compounded, creating musical moments––or entire genres––that challenge perceptions of where the human voice ends and the mechanized other begins. Such occurrences where the voice fuses inextricably with technology invites many interpretations, particularly regarding the gendered vocalic body and posthuman thought.

In this presentation, I consider how philosophies of posthumanism and cyborgfeminism work in tandem with theories of timbre and production to assess how boundaries between the human voice and musical machine have eroded over the last two decades. My case studies include Witch House artists where the vocal production leads the listener to question both the relationship between organic and synthetic and the vocalic body as a whole. Such approaches to recent electronic music reveal posthumanist tendencies that encourages reassessing dualisms including organic/machine or physical/nonphysical. By emphasizing these obscured dualisms in Witch House music, two production techniques surface. In the first, vocals are heavily masked by filtering effects that impart an ambiguity to gendered conjectures in vocal delivery. The second technique blurs perceptions of the vocalizer’s identity and humanness with musical effects that impose control over vocal delivery through layering and effect combinations that subsume the voice within a synthetic realm. These categories are further compounded by the genre's characteristic “narcotic nihilism” that frequently masks artists’ identities, leaving the listener autonomy to formulate their own conceptions of the vocalic body based on the genre’s minimal organic and visual elements.

By diminishing the voice’s humanness with layers of effects, Witch House music sets a precedent for posthumanist perspectives on vocal delivery. My study shows the expressive capacity for human-machine musical hybridization, while simultaneously distorting perception of a gendered vocalic body through the influence of technology. From a posthumanist evaluation, as the voice becomes inextricably blended into the musical machine, the singing persona’s identity is not compromised, per say, but instead is allowed to ascend beyond conventional Western Enlightenment binaries substantiated on patriarchal systems.

This paper explores the music of Tim Hecker's 2013 ambient electronic album, Virgins, and its seemingly paradoxical status within the ambient music idiom. The album remains a widely acclaimed and celebrated contribution within a quickly budding musical community, yet also defies many commonly accepted traits of the idiom from which it borrows. After a survey of recent scholarship on ambient music (Szabo 2017), its characteristic traits (Szabo 2019, Cummings 2019), and modes of its perception (Roquet 2016), I organize these traits into a weighted hierarchical pyramid after Johanna Frymoyer (2017). In doing so, I unite unanimously recognized traits across ambient music scholarship to catalog those pervasive elements which are “essential,” “frequent,” or else “stylistically particular or idiomatic.” I then provide an analysis cataloging the ways in which Hecker's composition develops, abandons, or completely contradicts those traits established by earlier landmark ambient albums. In reconciling its deviations, I draw upon David Temperley’s 2019 concept of Uniform Information Density, David Huron’s 2006 account of schematic musical expectations, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s 1990 cognitive “flow” model, supported further by Elizabeth Margulis's 2014 research on music listening and flow. The intersections of this scholarship suggest a listener-oriented perspective of ambient music listening in the context of attention, expectation, and flow. I propose the relevance of genre niching—the habit of listeners to seek a musical “flow-state” through an optimal balance of listener expectation and musical complexity—to reconcile the role Virgins holds within the ambient idiom. I conclude with further considerations and applications of genre niching beyond ambient music, and its role in the context of similar research on listener perception scholarship in dialogue with expectation-based musical listening.