3 Notes on Sound: Trans* Revision

Coming Out

In 2020, while in graduate school for intermedia at the University of Iowa’s School for Art, Art History, and Design, I co-wrote a manifesto on sound with poet Kayl Lockett. I was in a graduate program where I was told by faculty and peers that they did not know how to talk about my work because my work was exploring sound. This seemed clearer to my friends in the outsider arts community of Iowa City and other graduate students in the Music, Cinematic Arts, and Literary Translation Programs. After a printmaking MFA told me, “I think your work is really cool, I just don’t know how to talk about sound.” I resolved to create a document that would educate my studio arts audience before they could enter into a critical dialogue with my work. While this was a reaction to my previous frustration, my ultimate the goal was self-preservation, and the skills I developed in navigating the defence of the formal qualities of sound within the arts would become foundational for my work on trans* becoming.

I was not out yet as a queer trans woman, and it was through my work in instrument building and experimental radio that I first felt the freedom to explore my body. I came to realize that I was not who I thought I was. My gender liberation took place during performances in which I could share my secret. I was invited to participate in a local experimental music series called iHearIC with a jazz trio and a solo pianist. I brought two punks to perform with me who set up an excessive amount of music equipment only to pantomime performing along to an elevator music record I spun through two massive speakers. Halfway through the record, I walked off stage and left the building only to return with a city-owned garbage can that I used to push through the crowd and onto the stage. Once I crawled inside the garbage can, my collaborators began to manipulate the record until it faded out and I screamed, “I’m afraid I’m trans! I’m trans and I’m afraid!” in a sort of falsetto that my friends in the emo/screamo^[1] community have described as “the chirp.” My confession was illegible to the audience, and I felt closer to womanhood when I emerged from my Waste Management womb. In truth, this was the second time I performed a coming out publicly. The first time was over the airwaves of the University of Iowa radio station, KRUI. The exciting thing about radio is that no one is listening, and yet the electromagnetic waves travelled through the bodies of the eighty thousand or so humans within listening range of the station and onward through the cosmos. Unlike coming out on online social media platforms, there is no opportunity for immediate feedback. On the radio you can be mostly anonymous if you use a pseudonym and leave the station’s landline telephone off the hook.

Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making is what brought me around to the idea of a synesthetic object. The object is comprised of a wooden box with a tape recorder playing the sounds of the artist building the box.^[2] In Noise, Water, Meat, Douglas Khan gives the following examples to describe how the synesthetic cannot exist in a social sphere: “the schism involved in the voice one hears while speaking versus the voices others hear, or the celestial music and cosmic vibrations heard by a person at the time of death as opposed to the gurgling death rattle heard by everyone else.”^[3] As an artist, I took it as a challenge to create a synesthetic object that existed within a social sphere because that is how I have felt as a trans* person navigating academic space.

My work now is largely across the fields of both sound and transgender studies. I get up in front of rooms full of mostly cis people and explain my trans* experience. The celestial music of my trans* joy is usually missed. Like a recording of my own voice, the audience misses the additional layers of resonance I hear as the vibrations move through my own blood and bone toward my inner ear. Presenting my work on sound to sound people and presenting my work on trans art to trans* people yields different outcomes than when presenting sound to painters and transness to the bigender society at large.

My earliest instruments included the human body as part of their architecture. I wanted to use parts of my body as the bridge, neck, or resonant body of the larger system. Ultimately, this led me to Cathedral/Canal (2021), which compares audio feedback to gender dysphoria while also comparing interior spaces to exterior spaces. Feedback, the repetition of an audio input into its output whose speed dictates its aural qualities, is an instrument that is being played by my body through the insertion of a contact microphone into my inguinal canals. The metaphor of the action represents the internal struggle of actively questioning my gender as a trans person, an experience in which the smallest decision (I will paint my nails, I will wear gender-affirming clothing) provokes genuine anxiety and fear (What if I am murdered? Will I be able to find work?). Reverb and delay effects are used to reimagine my interior space as a grand architecture or wide canyon. The later image, a flattening of the natural world through technological echo, is reaching toward xenofeminist commitments to anti-naturalism as a mode of gender abolition.^[4]

Notes on “Notes”

“Notes on Sound: Sound Art and Sound as a Medium”

lorelei d’andriole, kayl lockett

 

• This is active discovery.
• You are the audience. Sound art is not meant for an exclusive audience of audio engineers, musicians, and other professionals. You already have all the words you need to talk about sound.
• The work is about and for YOU.
• There must be SPACE for exploration and discovery. This includes SPACE for failure.
• Sound art is not a new frontier.
• Sound art is what it is. Its components are not employed as signifiers to the signified. It does not build a bridge that you can recognize and cross. Sound is a river. Sound is happening all the time. We usually only engage with it when it is providing us with information (there’s a car approaching, there’s someone at the door), or when it’s organized in language or music. This is closer to language than music. This is not extramusical.
• Sound art is like poetry. Poetry is like dance. What repetitions, rhythms, associations make up its poetics?
• The materiality of the work is important, but it is not the only important thing about the work.
• Objects can be sounding bodies.
• Objects can be listening bodies.
• Sound is movement. Time manipulates the movement of sound, and vice versa. Sound is a time machine.
• Sound can access inaccessible spaces and illustrate radical alternatives.
• Sound is a community-building device.
• We are sounding bodies.
• We are listening bodies.

Reflecting on the Notes on Sound After Working Across Sound and Trans Studies for Three Years

I think ultimately this document was written to give permission to people to think about sound critically. The first three statements come from notes written as a reaction to the printmaker I met years ago who said they did not know how to talk about sound. These are followed by examples of common relationships to sound as information (“there’s a car approaching, there’s someone at the door”) specifically to help our audience with the problem of feeling like one doesn’t have the experience or expertise to have a conversation. I felt it was important to make a note to the effect that sound art is not in fact a new frontier, because of the common claim that sound art is an invention of the twentieth century, born amid Italian Fascism. I believe Dick Higgins’s definition of “intermedia” offers a useful example of an alternative understanding of sound within the history of art:

Again, the term is not prescriptive; it does not praise itself or present a model for doing either new or great works. It says only that intermedial works exist. Failure to understand this would lead to the kind of error of thinking that intermedia are necessarily dated in time by their nature, something rooted in the 1960s, like an art movement of the period. There was and could be no intermedial movement. Intermediality has always been a possibility since the most ancient times, and though some well-meaning commissar might try to legislate it away as formalistic and therefore antipopular, it remains a possibility wherever the desire to fuse two or more existing media exists.^[5]

I believe sound has always been an element in the history of art. It is not radical to say that sound art exists, and we must move beyond ascribing any novelty to the medium (“the materiality of the work is important, but it is not the only important thing about the work”). The notes on sounding and listening bodies are connected and was the proto-thesis to my years of experimenting with body and instrument. I can see this clearly now as I reflect on the sculpture/sonic performance, The Body Is an Instrument and My Instrument Is a Brick, that I shared at the Great Lakes Association of Sound Studies conference. The piece, in which I inject a snare drum with estrogen and proceed to pierce its head with every needle I have used to inject my own body with estrogen, was born from careful listening to my body and my musical instrument. The following is an artist statement on the work to illustrate the theory in practice:

I got off the phone knowing that I was going to become estranged from my family for being a trans woman and I thought drumming would help me. I proceeded to play the most beautiful drum solo I had ever played and may ever will. In the solo, I was focused on speaking to my instrument, begging my drums to help me and I felt deep in my soul that they responded with, “I am a drum set.”

I almost quit drumming after that. I thought, “I am a woman now, do I want to be a woman who plays drums? How does a trans woman even play drums?” When I sit behind the kit, I am utilizing the muscle memory I have developed, but whose muscles? Then I met another trans woman who was a jazz pianist going through the same crisis and we talked about the challenges of relearning our instruments. We adapted.

The question remained: How might a trans woman play drums? I thought of the history of drumming. One might argue that drums are the sound of creation, the first sound we hear is our mother’s heartbeat. The big bang. However, one might also look at the history of Western drum set technique and its roots in European and American armies. What kind of body do you imagine when you think of a drum set player? What gender do you think of when you think of drums? What sexuality?

I wanted a transsexual drum set. Then maybe if I reach out for help, there will at least be solidarity. I injected the drum with estrogen and punctured the head with every needle I have ever used on my own flesh. I think it sounds perfect.

I came into sound feeling misunderstood and that the academic audiences I was enmeshed in needed tools for thinking about and talking about sound. I remember a critique I had in graduate school in which I invited local punk and noise musicians to the performance and then to the formal critique. When one colleague of mine complained that the piece I presented was so loud that they felt offended and they left in protest, a local musician said that he thought the performance could have been even louder and he offered them a pair earplugs. If my colleagues couldn’t talk with me about sound, there was no way I was going to talk to them about my work exploring transsexuality. I created “Notes on Sound” to resolve a tension, and I asked my colleagues to watch a video version of “Notes” before I presented my work in future workshops. I hope that this document may be used as impetus for creating the language you need to communicate with the audience you want to be in dialogue with; or at the very least, as permission to find a new audience.

Three Actions

The following are three actions, activities, assignments, compositions, scenes, scores, or prompts for your consideration in your classroom, scholarly work, or studio practice. These were written in the spirit of the Fluxus and intermedia tradition in which I was trained, and they may be completed or interpreted in any way.