Even though voice is a medium for collective practice, as Walter Ong argues in his book *Orality and Literacy*, it is situated in a context that tends towards social binary structures and oppositions, that restrict its possibilities. These binaries have structured Western thinking since antiquity and favors a 'civilized white patriarchal' democracy. Nevertheless the nature of voice and its capablities overpass these oppositions of gender, nationality, culture, space, technology and power relations. This research seeks to unravel these possibilities of voice, with the intention to explore democratic ways of communication that embraces excluded forms of address. It deals with the dichotomies of male/female, public/private, expert/amateur, rational/ irational, ordered/wild.
Even though voice is a medium for collective practice, as Walter Ong argues in his book *Orality and Literacy*, it is situated in a context that tends towards social binary structures and oppositions, that restrict its possibilities. These binaries have structured Western thinking since antiquity and favor the 'civilized white male' subjectivities. Nevertheless the nature of voice and its capablities overpass these oppositions of gender, nationality, culture, space, technology and power relations. This research seeks to unravel these possibilities of voice, with the intention to explore democratic ways of communication that embraces excluded forms of address. It deals with the dichotomies of male/female, public/private, expert/amateur, rational/ irational, ordered/wild.
My ongoing research lead me to the public forums, speech, and the technologies that facilitate them, from a feminist perspective.
*So: what kinds of collective practice do voices make possible? How do they do this (by making space, creating the circumstances for forms of listening)? How has and does technology (mediation, amplification, streaming) expand those possibilities? And – crucially – how has gender limited and expanded those possibilities?*
Anne Carson's text *The Gender of Sound* in my thesis
This thesis is a series of three essays which relate to the female voices, collective voices and their mediation. They address the voice as a feminist tool for communicating, and an object of presence and inhabiting space. Historically, some modes of address have been marginalized and shut out of the public domain. The separation between private and public space has played an important role as it is related to gender separation. The collective voice is marginalized under the realm of the patriarchal individualistic society. The female voices is part of it. The texts deal particularly with the voice as a medium for collective practices. I will investigate this in further detail in *The Monstrosity of the female voices*. This collective vocalization affords the amplification and multiplication either with the aid of technology or embodied practices that refuses dominant ways of establishing presence and dialogue. Its mediation takes advantage of the technologies that emerge with an agonistic attitude, and resembles 'second orality'- a concept that Walter Ong has developed. I will investigate this in further detail in *Multiplication vis a vis Amplification*. In our democracy there is a fear of 'ugly' modes of address which are connected to the female body- blood, birth, death, mourning- and other dark aspects and passions that are perceived as threatening to society. These forms of vocalization are excluded from a public discourse which since antiquity have centered on “self-control” and “reason”. Such things are seen to create noise and disorder and "have to be kept" silent according to the patriarchal norms. But alternative mediums and forms of communication have been developed against this. I will investigate this in further detail in *Transmitting Ugly Things*.\
In recent years my concern has been with the presence of the female voices in public. During my previous studies I came to realize how my gendered body had been silenced or marginalized through slight gestures from male figures or institutional powers. By also observing women in their roles as members of my family, teachers, workers and immigrant neighbors of my youth, I discovered different types of marginalization and silencing. Examples would be women working at home, taking care of everything in the family and neglecting their own desires and interests, men interrupting them when articulating arguments in a political or formal dialogue and routinely underestimating their knowledge. The mediation of their voices and the way they became present, active participants and visible in public spaces and spheres became one of my principle interests. My past artistic projects reflected and responded to that concern while I worked with voice and sound which, as forms of art, are underestimated in the context of Western visual culture. As this text will outline, they are forms connected to irrational attitudes and oral cultures. The sound of voices reveals hidden suppressed aspects and subjectivities. Because of its temporariness, non-linearity, invisibility and border-less character sound can exist and travel within multiple dimensions of spaces simultaneously, creating bonds between them. Throughout history, oral cultures, by being based on vocal expression, differ from more recently established literate cultures in that they embrace the collective sharing of knowledge. More specifically they create "personality structures that in certain ways are more communal and externalized, and less introspective than those common among literates" (Ong, 2002, pg. 67). In recent times, feminists have included and embraced voice in their practices because there is a uniqueness in it, that embodies the speakers and their personal stories, while connecting the present listeners. Together with these concerns, about the exclusion of women’s voices, I also experienced a gender-based differentiation between amateur and expert knowledge, particularly when approaching telecommunication networks and technologies, with the intention of learning to build and use them for my artistch practice. This division of labor goes together with the gender exclusion. I quickly found out that I was not alone in this regard. The volunteers of an activist collective, Prometheus, expressed similar concerns in the construction of a radio station:
In recent years my concern has been with the presence of the female voices in public. During my previous studies I came to realize how my gendered body had been silenced or marginalized through slight gestures from male figures or institutional powers. By also observing women in their roles as members of my family, teachers, workers and immigrant neighbors of my youth, I discovered different types of marginalization and silencing. Examples would be women working at home, taking care of everything in the family and neglecting their own desires and interests, men interrupting them when articulating arguments in a political or formal dialogue and routinely underestimating their knowledge. Growing up I also found out that any form of feminine/female expression gets suppressed. The mediation of their voices and the way they became present, active participants and visible in public spaces and spheres became one of my principle interests. My past artistic projects reflected and responded to that concern while I worked with voice and sound which, as forms of art, are underestimated in the context of Western visual culture. As this text will outline, they are forms connected to irrational attitudes and oral cultures. The sound of voices reveals hidden suppressed aspects and subjectivities. Because of its temporariness, non-linearity, invisibility and border-less character sound can exist and travel within multiple dimensions of spaces simultaneously, creating bonds between them. Throughout history, oral cultures, by being based on vocal expression, differ from more recently established literate cultures in that they embrace the collective sharing of knowledge. More specifically they create "personality structures that in certain ways are more communal and externalized, and less introspective than those common among literates" (Ong, 2002, pg. 67). In recent times, feminists have included and embraced voice in their practices because there is a uniqueness in it, that embodies the speakers and their personal stories, while connecting the present listeners. Together with these concerns, about the exclusion of women’s voices, I also experienced a gender-based differentiation between amateur and expert knowledge, particularly when approaching telecommunication networks and technologies, with the intention of learning to build and use them for my artistic practice. This division of labor goes together with the gender exclusion. I quickly found out that I was not alone in this regard. The volunteers of an activist collective, Prometheus, expressed similar concerns in the construction of a radio station:
>"The radio activists presented the work of soldering a transmitter, tuning an antenna, and producing a news program or governing a radio station to be accessible to all. Nevertheless, they were conscious of patterned gaps in their organization and volunteer base: men were more likely than women to know how to build electronics, to be excited by tinkering, and to have the know-how to teach neophytes.This troubled the activists"(Dunbar-Hester, pg. 53-54).
@ -37,11 +35,12 @@ In one of my projects, *Sound Acts in Victoria Square* I 'inserted' the recorded
# 1. The Monstrosity of the female voices
## What modes: the annoying noise
Throughout this thesis, I am referring extensively to Anne Carson's text *The Gender of Sound*, because it indicates ...
Here I list, from the text of Anne Carson, *The Gender of Sound*, how, since ancient times, the female voices have been described;
>high-pitched, loud shouting, having too much smile in it, decapitated hen, heartchilling groan, garg, horrendous, howling dogs, being tortured in hell, deadly, incredible babbling, fearsome hullabaloo, she shrieks obscenities, haunting garrulity, monstrous, prodigious noise level, otherwordly echo, making such a racket, a loud roaring noise, disorderly and uncontrolled outflow of sound, shrieking, wailing, sobbing, shrill lament, loud laughter, screams of pain or of pleasure, eruptions of raw emotion, groan, barbarous excesses, female outpourings, bad sound, craziness, non-rational, weeping, emotional display, oral disorder, disturbing, abnormal, "hysteria", "Not public property", exposing her inside facts, private data, permits direct continuity between inside and outside, female ejaculation, "saying ugly things", objectionable, pollution, remarkable
In Ancient Greece, there was a superstition that associated high-pitched voices with evil. Humans, as defined by the patriarchy, differ in their nature to other animals, by virtue of their ability to articulate with sound and create ‘logos’ (speech). In the primitive stage of consciousness, "the brain was ‘bicameral’, with the right hemisphere producing uncontrollable ‘voices’ attributed to the gods which the left hemisphere processed into speech" (Ong, 2002, pg. 30). It was after the figure of Odysseus appeared that these voices didn't matter any more and the self-conscious mind was established. The story of Odysseus symbolizes the beginning of a society that is based on rationality. He, as a clever man, can resist in any temptation his body falls in- the primitive mind would be allured- by using his brain and speech, and that is why he manages to reach safe to his destination. Through 'logos', humans can develop dialogue and democratic processes of communication and decision- making. All the other forms of expression are considered wild and therefore irrational, including the 'hysterical' exposures of women. Aristotle and his contemporaries believed that vocal sounds were based on physiognomy, particularly the genitals of a person, which is why men speak at a low pitch, because of "the tension placed on a man’s vocal chords by his testicles functioning as loom weights" (Carson, 1996, pg. 119). The high-pitched utterance of women, called 'ololyga', which was a ritual practice dedicated to important events of the life, like the birth of a child or the death of a person, was considered a 'pollution' of civic space. If expressed in public, they would create chaos and provoke madness. In mythology, when Odysseus awakens on the island of Phaiakia, he is "surrounded by the shrieking of women (...) and goes on to wonder what sort of savages or super-natural beings can be making such a racket". These women were Nausica and her girlfriends, described by Homer as "wild girls who roam the mountains in attendance upon Artemis" (Carson, 1996, pg. 125). Similarly Alkaios, an ancient poet that had been expelled from the city, where public assemblies took place, was disgusted by the presence of women’s voices talking 'nonsense'. In the ancient world, women were excluded, occupying the margins of society, the dark and formless space where speech and thus politics, were absent. This disorderly, loud female noise was related to an uncivilized, wild space and sound deemed politically incorrect. It seems like these primitive 'uncontrollable voices' became related to some modes of address that were reminders of the past condition of the human brain, judging it as having a malignant influence.\
In Ancient Greece, there was a superstition that associated high-pitched voices with evil. Humans, as defined by the patriarchy, differ in their nature to other animals, by virtue of their ability to articulate with sound and create ‘logos’ (speech). In the primitive stage of consciousness, "the brain was ‘bicameral’, with the right hemisphere producing uncontrollable ‘voices’ attributed to the gods which the left hemisphere processed into speech" (Ong, 2002, pg. 30). It was after the figure of Odysseus appeared that these voices didn't matter any more and the self-conscious mind was established. The story of Odysseus symbolizes the beginning of a society that is based on rationality. He, as a clever man, can resist in any temptation his body falls in- the primitive mind would be allured- by using his brain and speech, and that is why he manages to reach safe to his destination. Through 'logos', humans can develop dialogue and democratic processes of communication and decision- making. And here is where Tilemachos says... All the other forms of expression are considered wild and therefore irrational, including the 'hysterical' exposures of women. Aristotle and his contemporaries believed that vocal sounds were based on physiognomy, particularly the genitals of a person, which is why men speak at a low pitch, because of "the tension placed on a man’s vocal chords by his testicles functioning as loom weights" (Carson, 1996, pg. 119). The high-pitched utterance of women, called 'ololyga', which was a ritual practice dedicated to important events of the life, like the birth of a child or the death of a person, was considered a 'pollution' of civic space. If expressed in public, they would create chaos and provoke madness. In mythology, when Odysseus awakens on the island of Phaiakia, he is "surrounded by the shrieking of women (...) and goes on to wonder what sort of savages or super-natural beings can be making such a racket". These women were Nausica and her girlfriends, described by Homer as "wild girls who roam the mountains in attendance upon Artemis" (Carson, 1996, pg. 125). Similarly Alkaios, an ancient poet that had been expelled from the city, where public assemblies took place, was disgusted by the presence of women’s voices talking 'nonsense'. In the ancient world, women were excluded, occupying the margins of society, the dark and formless space where speech and thus politics, were absent. This disorderly, loud female noise was related to an uncivilized, wild space and sound deemed politically incorrect. It seems like these primitive 'uncontrollable voices' became related to some modes of address that were reminders of the past condition of the human brain, judging it as having a malignant influence.\
Today women in public life worry if their voices are too light or high to command respect. Politicians, like Margaret Thatcher, for instance, were trained to learn how to speak in public, to deepen their voice, in order to be taken as seriously as a male speaker would be. Anne Carson (1996, pg. 120) observes that the female voices in public is related to madness, witchery, bestiality, disorder, death and chaos. And thus has to stay hidden from sight.
