Women Sonic Thinkers: The Histories of Seeing, Touching and Embodying Sound, 2019
“Women Sonic Thinkers - The Histories of Seeing, Touching and Embodying Sound” explores the histories of sonic thinking and practice in the context of sound arts through a feminist perspective. Specifically, it forms a critical investigation of how self-identifying women artists working with sound and technology as well as writing about sound and technology, have sought to respond and to an extent subvert the techno-determinist attitude towards, what I call, sounding arts. What potential alternative methodologies, ones that operated outside the “sanctioned” norms and regulations as prescribed by male domination in sound art, were invented, discovered and utilised by those who, one way or another, were marginalised or working outside the stereotypically ingrained canons (the rational, objective and what one may consider - a masculine approach to sound)?
The chapter, thus, questions what methods manifested in the artists’ conceptualisations and writings about sound as a result since the invention of the first auditory technologies such as the phonograph at the start of the twentieth century.
‘Women Sonic Thinkers - The Histories of Seeing, Touching and Embodying Sound’, in The
Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art, eds. Sanne Krogh Groth and Holger Schulze (London: Bloomsbury Publishing,
2020)