Writing

Feminist Frequencies addresses the question of how socio-political differences and lived experiences of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity may be perceived to manifest in the making of sound arts and experimental musics with a specific focus upon works made by women. Drawing upon compositions, installations and artist-archives including works by Lina Džuverovic, Anne Hilde Neset, Cathy Lane, Emma Hedditch, Sonia Boyce, Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether, Feminist Frequencies considers the different ways in which the category of “woman” has been historically silenced, erased, ignored and disqualified from and misrepresented within dominant historical sound and music histories.

Feminist Frequencies emerges from the PhD research “Composing Paradoxes: Feminist Process in Sound Arts and Experimental Musics” completed at City University London in 2014.

The SGFA Zine celebrates a growing network of people working within, through and beyond the fields of sound, feminism and gender who have contributed to the SGFA events of 2012 and 2014. Sound::Gender::Feminism::Activism was initially established as a research event focusing on the role of gender in sound-based arts and experimental musics.

Ingleton, H., Angus Carlyle & Cathy Lane. 2016. SGFA Zine CRiSAP. CC BY NC ND

Ingleton, H. 2016. “Sounding Out Parameters of Intimate Publics.” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Vol 20, pp.77-87. University of Nebraska Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/631944

This paper considers the role that discourses of fundamental acoustic parameters, in particular pitch and timbre, have played in the reproduction of a significantly (male) gendered digital music landscape in and beyond the UK. By revisiting a nineteenth century debate about the definition of tone, which occurred between Georg Simon Ohm and August Seebeck, the paper exposes some of the ways that these foundational audiotechnical discourses have been articulated through implicitly gendered, sexualised and racialised discourses. Certain ways in which these discourses have been performed differently are then addressed through Kim Gordon’s and Jutta Koether’s installation, Reverse karaoke: Automatic music tent (2005), which establishes a creative space where performing and listening function as social events that are transmitted along a specifically queer feminist frequency.

Keywords: Pitch; Timbre; Race; Gender; Sexuality; Queer Feminist Performativity

Ingleton, H. 2016. “Recalibrating Fundamentals of Discipline and Desire through the Automatic Music Tent” Contemporary Music Review, 35:1, 71-84. doi/full/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176768

Ingleton, H. 2014. “Variations on a Theme: Food, Sex and Silence.” Sounding Food and Music: Contemporary Connections.

Her Noise: Identifying Feminist Strategies explores the process by which feminist politics informed the development of Her Noise, a project that commissioned installations and performances by individual artists and collaboratively developed an archive of experimental and sound-based arts and musics with a focus on gender. The paper traces the politics that informed and influenced the project, considered as an artwork in itself, by analysing the ambiguous foundations encapsulated in the title Her Noise through Joan W. Scott’s understanding of the paradoxical nature of sexual difference as discursively produced and productive of change.

Ingleton, H. 2012. “Her Noise: Identifying Feminist Strategies.Reflections on Process in Sound, CRiSAP, no. 1.

Ingleton, H. 2005. “Making Spaces: Feminist Contexts in Sonic Arts”. BA dissertation: Middlesex University London (unpublished).

Ingleton, H. 2017. Review of “The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order”, by Kate
Eichhorn. Feminist Review 115: 171. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-017-0032-4