This web-audio interface was made by <a href="https://w-i-t-m.net" target="
_">Angeliki Diakrousi</a>. It challenges the ways we are listening to certain female sounding voices that are perceived as inappropriate - because of the quality of their sound, their gender, the medium's distortions but also stereotypes and collective memories that they often awake. These are verbal expressions that have been associated with forms of monstrosity since ancient times. Contributors are invited to record themselves with their own microphones, expressing their thoughts and choose a type of distortion. They are invited to participate in forming new imaginaries around a technologically mediated collective voice that through its 'monstrosity' can reveal other forms of speech that embrace their damage. They can choose what type of mediated voice they want to do that. A series of writings reveals stories and theories on the topic. The interface allows any voice to be recorded and saved in the artist's server where the website is hosted. There they get distorted through several scripts. Then the new sounds are categorized, depending on the chosen distortion, and published back in the platform. They can be played at the same time or in any desired order. The interface was first made for the performance "Radioactive Monstrosities" as part of the event <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/524864625047957/"> NL_CL #2 : FLESH</a> hosted by <a href="https://instrumentinventors.org/">iii</a> and <a href="https://netherlands-coding-live.github.io/">Netherlands Coding Live</a> and its conceptualization is an ongoing process related to my graduation research <a href="eaiaiaiaoi.w-i-t-m.net"> Let's Amplify Unspeakable Things</a> and previous <a href="http://w-i-t-m.net/2019/radio-active-female-monstrosity_2019.html">performances </a><p>
<i>Credits</i>: the platform is inspired by Vocable Code <a href="http://siusoon.net/vocable-code/">http://siusoon.net/vocable-code/</a>. Regarding the references I would like to thank Alice, Gert, Joana for sharing material with me, as well Amy for her publication made for the workshop <a href="http://w-i-t-m.net/2020/ecstatic-speech-2020.html">Eclectic Speech</a>. Thanks to the people that contributed and donated their voices.<p>
<div style="color:#A19696"><i>Some more thoughts:</i> Women's voices are often going through censorship and critique when they appear in public. They have to be adjusted and filtered in order to be heard and avoid silencing. This is extended to the technological apparatus that channel their voices, like radio. The listeners then, are hearing a distorted voice that expresses needs and opinions of its physical proprietor and it goes beyond its control. In this work I focus on the sound of that voice that is asking to become part of public dialogues. In the platform I refer to several examples that such voices have been through some kind of distortion. But it is not only women's voices that are going through these filters. It is also the queer, any feminine sounding voice, the collective, the resistant, the black and so many more. The examples I refer to have attracted my attention and are triggering aspects of my personal identity. This platform intends to welcome any case of medium's transformations that certain voices are going through as an extension of the society's censorship. I want to open the dialogue to more communities and people that have noticed an exclusion through mediated speech platforms. I invite you to reclaim these distortions that characterize excluded voices. Their distortion becomes their quality that is also their damage, through which needs, opinions, desires are expressed. I made a set of tools that distort the voice in ways that are borrowed from the examples I have encountered in my research. I invite you to choose the voice that you think reflects your personal needs, damages or you want to talk through it and become part of this dialogue and share your own experience or your imaginations about this voice. Sometimes this mediated voice is safer as it camouflages the actual vocal identity, and become anonymous.</div><p>
