I first got involved with the Her Noise Project and Archive in 2010. This happened through an internship where I was tasked to catalogue the project and facilitate its donation from Electra, a small arts organisation in London, to the University of the Arts London, under the auspices of CRiSAP.

What initially drew me to this archive was that my previous educational experiences in sonic arts and experimental musics, not only almost exclusively drew upon curriculum dominated by white Euro/American men, but also was one in which I experienced sexism and bias on a daily basis (racism and trans/homophobia were not even terms that could even begin to be addressed in my academic experiences in early 2000’s in the UK). In cataloguing the project and archive it became apparent that many of the audiovisual artefacts were in a state of disrepair, so I offered also to repair, restore, re-edit and digitise a lot of the material. I did this for two reasons, one, I wanted to access the material within and two, I thought it important that others should also be able to access the sonic lives and worlds of the people who made up both this project and archive.

In early discussions about Her Noise, as I understood it, the curators seemed to be worn out by the demands of the project, which took five years to produce and by the time I got involved, had demanded another five years of un/underfunded upkeep. The production and maintenance of the project had seemingly demanded a lot from the lives of the curators, as all work that seeks to challenge a status quo does.

In working between Electra and CRiSAP, my understanding, gleaned from numerous conversations and meetings, was that this archive was never meant to represent a definitive history of women in sound, but rather it offered a starting point and would continue to grow, to be added to, to be a living archive. Whilst this still seemed to be a common agreement, I was tasked with creating new interviews and in collaboration with members of CRiSAP and Electra, I built www.hernoise.org. 

An exhibition titled Slow Runner: Her Noise Archive II was held in Karlsruhe, Germany, the Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic symposium took place at London’s Tate Modern and the Vocal Folds Symposium, inspired by the Her Noise Archive, took place in Oslo, Norway. We also began using the archive as a teaching resource. We were all doing a lot of work off the back of this project, in my case often as a labour of love, to try to animate discussions about gender and sound within our orbits.

I was aware of the whiteness of the project, even though one of its main curators, similarly to myself, comes from a mixed background. One of the early ways I hoped to address this was to try to set up a meeting between the Lambeth Women’s Project, who also had an archive of artefacts in which there was a lot of crossover with the Her Noise Project, and Electra and CRiSAP. Sadly, this generous offer to really expand the archive, to enact the late Stuart Hall’s expansive definition of a living archive, was turned down. I regret this missed opportunity to have been able to open the space to  discussions about gender and race which not only would have benefited the University of the Arts London, but also which were so urgently needed amongst the student body and staff.