1

Castles in the Sky: Clouds, Voices & the Aural Dispersal of the

Body Post Internet

Final Research Essay 2Nik Rawlings

Tutor: Dr. Kersten GlandienSubmitted Monday 9th February 2015

I’d like to think

of my body as

a cloud

I have enough lack

of muscle definition to be

considered that way

Or as codecs

degrading grains of an original

while unifying them

by rough similarity

2

Contents

INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………………...4

SOFT COERCION: THE SOOTHING FEMALE VOICE OF CONTROL……………………………………....6

DYNAMIC BODIES, IMAGINED NETWORKS: THE BODY OF THE POST-INTERNET…………………….10

GRANULAR SYNTHESIS, DISPERSAL, AND THE CLOUD……………………………………………...15

SWARMS: THE GRANULAR NETWORK-VOICE OF HOLLY HERNDON…………………………………19

AURAL PROSTHESIS, SONIC CONCEALER: THE PERFECTED BODY OF HANNAH DIAMOND…………… 24

THE NEW (GRANULAR) AESTHETIC……………………………………………………………… 27

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………29

BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………………30

LIST OF WORKS…………………………………………...……………………………………34

3

In the developed world, our every move is inscribed into data, networked, archived. The

collapse of distance between the internet and our communications, trade, relationships and

bodies has begun to dramatically change conceptions of subjectivity and of embodiment.

Through greater integration of technology, the cultural imagination of the form of technology

begins to affect the form of the subject and the body.

As a key signifier of the body, musicians and artists use the voice to explore this process of

integration and transformation, and explore new and developing forms of embodiment. This

essay considers the context of, and processes behind practices that create extended,

impossible or hyper-real voices.

The first chapter, considers the way that the female voice is employed in public space to

signify central power in what is referred to as soft coercion. Here, the female voice is seen to

provide a respectable, motherly façade to coercive power, that represents the ideal of late-

capital, if not the bodies it benefits. This reading of public space as upheld by the

technologized voice leads to a dissection of similar voices in personal devices, and the role

that these voices play in encouraging the regular divulging of personal data.

The second chapter examines, of the corporate concealment of the material realities of the

internet and computation, behind representations of these technologies as amorphous and

fluid forms. Subsequently, a discussion of how these representations effect the cultural

imaginations of technologies, and in so doing, shape our relationships with them.

The next chapter examines the history and development of works using Granular Synthesis,

with particular scrutiny being given to the materiality that has previously been ascribed to

this process. A development of this investigation will posit Granular Synthesis as functioning

itself as a network technology. Then, through case studies of two artists using granular

processes, Holly Herndon and Hannah Diamond, it is argued that this aural network

functions both as a structural metaphor for the internet, but also as facilitating the

production of manipulated, extended and impossible voices which (in the same way that an

organic voice signifies the physical body) signify the augmented, divided, hyper-real of the

networked body.

Following on from the establishment of these comparisons, the concluding chapter argues for

a deeper understanding of the forms and metaphors involved in the processes that sound

4

practitioners employ for sound-making, against a background of growing technological

illiteracy and the political problems that this creates.

5

Soft Coercion: The Soothing Female Voice of Control

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of secondhand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us; a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.1

-Jean Baudrillard

In Simulacra and Simulations, Jean Baudrillard considers the construction of the ‘hyperreal’ by

late capitalist society, arguing that the ‘real’ has been replaced by simulations of a real, and

by simulacra, signs and forms which may have had no reality in the first place. As

Baudrillard writes, in a society where simulated realities have entirely enveloped those

which may be considered ‘authentic,’ a form of nostalgia for authenticity, bodily reality and

objectivity become prevalent.2

The voice is considered to be an authentic and reliable document of the self, body and

identity by legal, political and journalistic institutions. Consider for example, the use of

linguistic analysis by immigration officials to determine the true origin of refugees who are

attempting to claim asylum but are without identification papers.3, 4 Here, the grain and

accent of a voice is considered to hold more truth than the words spoken.

6

1 J. Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, Selected Writings, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1988 pp. 166-184

2 I.bid.

3 D. Eades ‘Applied Linguistics and Language Analysis in Asylum Seeker Cases’, Applied Linguistics, vol.26, no. 4, 2005 pp. 503-526

4 “…mass migrations that became the catalyst for immigration authorities around the world to turn to forensic speech analysis to determine which individuals had been displaces as a result of the catastrophic invasions [of the Afghan and Iraq wars] and which were simply migrants posing as refugees…In these circumstances, the interview process between the immigration authorities and the asylum seeker is recorded, and the claimants voice is then analysed by phoneticians…these in turn contract regional phoneticians to assess whether the voice and accent correlate with the claim of national origin.”

-L. Abu Hamdan, ‘The Freedom of Speech Itself’, Cabinet, vol. 43, 2011, pp. 81-85.

Mladen Dolar writes that the voice is the outward signifier of the body, an auditory

externalization of the internal, but that this relation becomes troublesome in acousmatic

situations as is typically the case with the technologized and mediated voice:

The voice appears as the link which ties the signifier to the body. It indicates that the signifier, however purely logical and differential, must have a point of origin and emission in the body (…) There is no voice without a body, but yet again this relation is full of pitfalls: it seems that the voice pertains to the wrong body, or doesn’t fit the body at all, or disjoints the body from which it emanates. 5

The voice can therefore be seen as proof of a body, yet this relation becomes complicated by

the emergence of technologies that remove the body from the voice (the voice mediated by

technology is almost always an acousmatic voice, without a visible source-body), or that

create networks, archives and databases out of it, or appropriate it for new ends.

In one example of this repurposing of the voice away from the body, Nina Power examines

the relationship of the female-sounding voice to what she refers to as the ‘soft coercion’ of the

instructive voice in public spaces. The female-sounding voice, reconstructed from

fragmentary prerecorded phrases and archived into computer systems has, she says, become

that of automated announcement systems, and of:

The sound of a quiet catastroph[e], of social control as such, rather than just the ordinary running of things. This particular construction of gender - albeit of a disembodied, ghostly kind - would make the recorded female voice a kind of cover-story for a normalcy that is in fact a state of emergency, of crisis, of barbarism and capitalism.6

Power here calls into question the role of the female-sounding voice in glossing over the

‘barbarism’ of everyday control structures. Why is it that the voice telling us, for example,

that the train we wish to take home after work is that of a woman? Power asks; would a male

voice sound too ‘serious’, too clearly authoritarian?7

7

5 M. Dolar. A Voice and Nothing More. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2006 pp. 59-60.

6 N. Power,. ‘Soft Coercion, The City and the Recorded Female Voice’, in The Acoustic City, M. Gandy & B.J. Nilsen,(eds.), Jovis, Berlin. 2014 pp. 23-26 .

7 Ibid. p. 25.

She argues that the female voice is in fact part of a ‘re-gendering and re-coding of control’8, it

has been co-opted as the ideologically symbolic (she posits that these voices are mostly the

clipped, brusque voices of upper middle class women; read as conservative, sensible,

privileged and bureaucratic, like a Mary Poppins character ordering us through the city), yet

not representative (for power is still mainly in the hands of men) voice of control, of capital;

the voice of soft coercion, telling us to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ through the catastrophic

melee of late capitalism.9

Power also refers to the voice of Siri, the voice-activated personal assistant on Apple iOS

devices. Siri, according to Power, by default responds with a female voice, with the

implication that;

… Her (default) female voice fits into a continuum of secretaries and personal assistants [in a way that] is clear (if you ask Siri who ‘she’ is she will respond ‘I am your humble personal assistant’).10

However, it is the aim of the device to be forgotten; to be integrated ever more seamlessly

into the everyday and into our bodies. As Graham Harman has written, tools are most ‘tool-

like’ when they are hardly noticeable at all, silently performing their function without any

disruption.11

The operation of the female voice in the case of technologies such as Siri, along with the

development of simplified interfaces and an image-based rather than text-based internet is to

coerce more spontaneous and organic usage of a device, blend seamlessly into the

background; and in doing so, to glean more and more personal data (and use value) from us.

As Elvia Wilk writes;

Forgetting the device makes it possible to forget that your online identity does not

directly correlate with your physical one. Sure, you still ‘create’ or curate yourself online,

8

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 G. Harman,. Towards speculative realism. Zero Books, Winchester, 2010 p. 83

but now that the internet is a visual arena with real time access, your identity is no longer

as amorphous or abstracted from reality as it once was. 12

In the wake of the revelations of the documents released by Edward Snowden, the

confirmation of the worst fears of internet surveillance have been confirmed; that we are all

indiscriminately being watched by governmental agencies - and that corporate business and

social media allow the back-doors to be built for this.13 It is therefore possible to view the

attempt by the device, by social media and other network and communication technologies,

to be fully integrated into the everyday and into our bodies, as inherent to the programs of

data collection and surveillance that have developed.

Artist Harry Sanderson’s show Unified Fabric at the South London gallery ‘Arcadia_missa’14,

saw Sanderson present a render-farm; a group of networked computers, pooling resources to

continuously render videos through complex graphic processes. This was an attempt to

expose the geographies and physicalities of networks (they rely on vast computing power,

that is situated somewhere, rather than actually being immaterial, and rely on exploitative

labour for their production and maintenance). Mike Runyan, responding to the show, writes;

What we secrete is data. What the corporate, unified image secretes is the ideology of the robber barons of data, who have gained bulk possession of our collective experience through their capacity to build infrastructure. This capacity to build has always been the foundation of power-syphoned via ownership.15

In the case of technologies such as Siri therefore, the female voice functions as another form

of soft coercion, streamlining the usage of devices that transcribe our communications, actions

and bodies into accessible data. Siri is here the unthreatening, soothing assistant-voice

disguising the true intent of those ‘robber barons of data.'

9

12 E. Wilkes, ‘Where looks don’t matter and only the best writers get laid: Subjectivity and other unfulfilled promises of the text-based Internet’, in (networked) Every Whisper Is A Crash On My Ears, Arcadia_Missa (eds.), Arcadia_Missa, London, 2014 p.42

13 ‘Jacob Applebaum: To Protect And Infect Part 2’, Online Video, 2014, accessed 22 October 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vILAlhwUgIU

14 H. Sanderson, Unified Fabric, London, Arcadia_Missa 2013

15 M. Runyan, ‘Life In the Data Center Doesn’t Stop…When You Live Your Life’ in (networked) Every Whisper Is A Crash On My Ears, Arcadia_Missa (eds.), Arcadia_Missa, London, 2014 p.169

Dynamic Bodies, Imagined Networks: The Body of the Post-Net

“Be water, my friend”

-Bruce Lee

The way that we culturally imagine the internet and computing, as with all technologies,

forms the way that we relate to them. Harry Sanderson’s efforts to foreground the material

and exploitative realities of the internet and of computing also unfold attempts to maintain

representations of these technologies as ‘immaterial,' mutable and dynamic that function to

create what he refers to as a “necessary insouciance towards the exploitation and violence

required for their continuing production.”16

In his essay Human Resolution, Sanderson posits that Cartesian dualism (the disjunction from,

and privileging of mind over body), via the “making of the enlightenment man”(ref), paved

the way for a privileging of the production of the intellect whilst denying “personhood to the

body of those converted into objects [ie., viewed only as labour resources] in the name of

profit”17:

The   computer   and   the   network,   emerging   from   this   philosophical   locus,   can   be   seen   as   concatenations   of   violent power  structures  borne  by  the  amputation  of  the  intellect  from  the  body,  and  obscured  by  digital  form.18 (ref)

To maintain these economies of exploitation, Sanderson argues that representations of the

internet and computation employ ameliorative imagery and nomenclature that are fluid,

weightless and mutable. These obscure the oppression of bodies that “died to improve the

sharpness of a film19” or that are “curtailed and enclose[d] […] in both the physical world

and the virtual”20 behind a smokescreen of images that are an expression (and also a

demonstration) of these technologies. These fabrications can be considered to fulfill what

10

16 H. Sanderson, ‘Human Resolution’, Mute, accessed 2 January 2015, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/human-resolution

17 ibid., p. 3.

18 ibid.

19 ibid., p. 1.

20 ibid., p. 9

Baudrillard refers to as the “panic stricken production of the real and the referential”21, a

construction of a hyper-reality that operates above and separate to the material realities of

production.

Cloud, Stream, Swarm - the names by which we refer to quotidian technologies further a

representation of them as immaterial, weightless, flowing. As an advert that Sanderson refers

to, for Cisco Systems’ cloud computing services states, alongside amorphous digitally

rendered membranes: “You can’t touch it, you can’t see it, but you feel its power.”22 These

weightless and reified conceptions of the network and computing fabricate cultural

imaginations of them as exactly that.

Sanderson notes that these conceptions of fluidity have been achieved through an ecological

reading of technology and capital, achieved by the insertion of devices into the everyday and

into the body.23 As we have already seen, technologies and devices already not only form

coercive power structures, but do so by subsuming the body, via voice, into its interface. He

writes that the integration and equation of the body with the machine in their

representations, posits the machine, and therefore the exploitative architectures and

(dualistic) hierarchies of globalised capital which produce it, as expressing a natural, organic

and undeniably right way of things:

After   the   equation   of   body   with   machine   comes   the   equation   of   the   machine   in   symbiosis   with,   and   as   an expression  of  the  inalienable  rightness  of  Nature.  To  understand  how  this  occurs,  we  must  appreciate  the  unity  of word   and   image   in   forging   connections   which   flatten   and   obscure   domination   by   equating   it   with   self-­organising ‘flows’  and  ‘energies’,  attempting,  through  obfuscation  and  metaphor,  to  suggest  that  these  relations  are  something other   than   ‘the   triumph   of   invested   capital,   whose   title   as   absolute   master   is   etched   deep   onto   the   hearts   of   the dispossessed  on  the  employment  line’24

Here, fluidity functions as a metaphor for nature itself, which in turn ‘flattens and obscures

domination’ and creates a hyper-real facade that distances the consumer from the material

and exploitative realities of the network, devices and computing.

11

21 Baudrillard, op. cit., p. 166.

22 ‘Cisco Unified Fabric: For a Better Life’, Online Video, 2011, accessed 27 December 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKiXyyZ21nk

23 Sanderson, op.cit., p. 6.

24 ibid.

If computational and networking power are then, articulated in corporate image culture as

clouds, streams, fabrics or liquid to obscure the realities of their production, how have these

forms affected cultural imaginations and interpretations of technology at the consumer, public

and social level?

If one considers fluids for a moment; what material qualities come to mind? One may float,

swim, dive or drown within them, be enveloped or showered by them. Here, the description

of the defunct internet aesthetic, ‘Seapunk,' and its tropish use of graphically rendered

oceans and marine fauna by artist Zombelle seem pertinent:

Seapunk, if you wanna be really basic, if you replace the S-E-A with C, like

cyberpunk – like the Internet and the vast sea of information that you can find on

the Internet – if you look at it that way, and then you look at the aesthetic, it kind

of makes a little more sense. I definitely have a fascination with the ocean, and I

have a lot of different feelings for large bodies of water, including fear and

including apocalyptic vibes of fear that some day the ocean’s gonna swallow us,

and what are we gonna do about that, like, it’s gonna be a water world reality. So

it’s all of those things combined together, and that’s why the style is more of a

future vibe.25

Here, Zombelle relates the content stored online as forming a ‘sea of information,' a sea that

she fears may consume us until we too are its fauna. A fear of drowning within a maelstrom

of information and communications is ironically a frequent concern of TED-talks, clickbait

sites, or online op-ed writing; there are many scaremongering articles decrying our voyage to

the bottom of this particular sea.26

A very similar rendered body of water greets the browser at calm.com, an online relaxation

service.27 Its users may select guided meditations of varying lengths, with ambient ‘spa’

12

25 N. Harwood, ‘You Never Thought Seapunk Would Take It This Far’, Respect Magazine, 2012, accessed 4 January 2015, http://respect-mag.com/you-never-thought-seapunk-would-take-it-this-far-zombelle-talks-azealia-banks-rihanna-the-week-the-second-internet-exploded/

26 ‘A year offline, what I have learned: Paul Miller at TEDxEutropolis’, Online Video, 2013, accessed 22 January 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trVzyG4zFMU

27 Calm.com, Website, accessed 8 February 2015, https://www.calm.com/

music and a female voice-over (another form of soft coercion: ‘let your focus come to your

breath’) accompanying alternately; a backdrop of a calm ocean under yellow sunsets or a sea

in which we are immersed and looking toward the surface, clouds through which we fly or

watch swirl about with sunlight breaking through, or rivers flowing over rocks.

‘Virtual’ meditation, hyper-dieting and health technologies are also prevalent forms that are

frequently occupied and appropriated by Post-Internet artists, and constitute much of the

sound work that has been produced by associated artists and musicians, playing on the

coercive HD-kitsch of automaton workout instructors and yogis.

These forms can be understood as symptomatic of networked late capital, where a ‘fear of

missing out’ and incessant demand of prosumer economies makes sleep an undesirable

waste of potentially ‘productive’ time28, a blockage in the efficient flows of the hyper-real.

Soft coercion on the personal scale - for your wellbeing.

However, Gene McHugh, whose blog ‘Post-Internet’ was an early proponent of the term,

offers a slightly more pragmatic view.29 He posits that the ‘digital native’ generation, for

whom the internet has always been part of their social development, do not consider the

‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ as necessarily exclusive realms.30 For McHugh, online and offline are

no longer mutually exclusive, but rather constitute a new, mixed reality, where online

existence requires new and more adaptable performances of the self, to negotiate the

complex range of social contexts it encompasses.31 This view of the internet as a banal fact of

everyday life, that has expanded and circumscribed social and political reality is key to the

notion of a Post-Internet.

McHugh also describes a ‘push and pull’ of online and offline scenarios which together

forms the users’ reality,32 which resonates with the processes of ‘becoming fluid’ that

13

28 J. Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Verso, London, 2013, p.10.

29 G. McHugh, ‘The Context of the Digital: A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships’, in You Are Here - Art After The Internet, O. Kholeif, Cornerhouse, London, 2014, pp. 28-34

30 ibid., p. 31.

31 Worth mentioning here too, is that the decentralisation of labour in Late Capitalism requires its subjects to constantly negotiate these myriad scenarios in search of work, collaboration and commonality.

32 ibid., p.29.

Branden Hookway argues is a key factor in all interfaces; especially within the interface’s

matrix of power, agency and subjectification:33

Fluidity provides a powerful metaphor for the operation of the interface, as well as for associated processes of mediation and control. To engage an interface is also to become a constituent element within a kind of fluidity. Likewise, subjectification may be described as a process of becoming fluid34 […] the interface is both an interiority confined by its bounding entities and a means of accessing, confronting or projecting into an exteriority. It is defined by its bounding entities at the same time that it defines them.35

Hookway’s investigation into the interface also finds that the word originated from the study

of fluid dynamics in the nineteenth century, coined by James Thomson to:

Denote a dynamic boundary condition describing fluidity according to its

separation of one distinct fluid body from another. The interface would define

and separate areas of unequal energy distribution within a fluid in motion,

whether this difference is given in terms of velocity, viscosity, directionality of

flow, kinetic form, pressure, density, temperature, or any combination of these.

From difference the interface would produce fluidity.36

The interface of fluid dynamics is an amorphous zone of contestation, meetings and

differences, while the technological interface is a similarly fluid form.

If we enter into a state of (subjective) fluidity when dealing with interfaces, while

contemporary life involves constant negotiations at the borders (interface) of the on- and

offline realms; then not only could fluidity be considered a ‘powerful metaphor’ within our

conception of network technologies, but also for the form of highly networked selfhood in

which subjectivity becomes performance, and subjectification is a central tool of control.

In this context of integrated online and offline experiences and, co-opted (female) voices and

fluid bodies, it is perhaps no surprise that so many vocalists - especially those whose bodies

are called into question by the coercive pressures of networked late-capitalism - choose to

14

33 B. Hookway, Interface, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2014.

34 ibid., p. 5.

35 ibid., p., 9.

36 ibid., p. 59.

modify, augment, network, perfect or multiply their voices; by extension also performing all

of these processes upon their bodies.

The following chapters will consider how vocalists, in particular those using techniques

based upon Granular Synthesis, manipulate their voices in ways that form both aural and

processual metaphors for the networked self-hoods, and in doing so, create aural cultures

which confront the issues of agency, representation, performance and control discussed

above. An argument will be made that this division of original bodies of sound, their

dispersion and recombination into new and mutable sound-bodies can be read as

functioning as a process of becoming fluid, performing the molten body of the Post-Internet.

Granular Synthesis, dispersal, and the cloud

Microsound, an experimental music scene that flourished mainly between the early 1990s to

early 2000s37, dealt in the ‘small sounds’ of Granular Synthesis and glitches. Microsound’s

central writer, Curtis Roads, posits that rather than only existing as waves, sound also exists

as particles in different time scales, from the very long to the ‘infinitesimally’ short.38

Granular Synthesis functions by creating multitudes of ‘grains’ of sound, which theoretically

can exist in all and any of the time scales described by Roads, but which in practice, are

generally defined as less than 100 milliseconds long. These grains can either be entirely

synthesized or, as in the works that this paper is primarily concerned with, made by dividing

(granulating) an original audio recording or live stream of sound, and then using these

grains to create entirely new sounds that can bear little to no resemblance to the original

sound itself (resynthesis). Grains can be given a volume envelope, and analyzed for

harmonic and timbral traits, and selected and organised from these differing characteristics

for playback and manipulation.39

15

37 The Microsound scene of the mid 1990s onwards was more generally an independent scene as opposed to the Institutional settings in which much Granular work had previously been made. The context of increased computational power available at consumer level and it’s relation to the development of this scene at this time, hardly bears repeating, but is important not only to the availability of tools for such work but also, as we’ll see, to the discourses that informed the material concerns that microsonic works addressed.

38 C. Roads, Microsound, 1st ed. MIT Press Cambridge, Mass., 2001 p.3.

39 ibid., p. 235.

From the very earliest granular works, such as Iannis Xenakis’ Concrete PH40,41, grains of

sound have been used to create ‘zones of intensity,' networks, or ‘clouds’. These approaches

were a development on the earlier ‘sound mass’ or cluster found within the works of György

Ligeti or Henry Cowell.

Clouds or zones of grains form coherent and dynamic ‘meso-temporal’ sound architectures

within a composition, or more simply, they combine multitudes of grains into cohesive yet

changing sounds.42 These amorphous forms, and the collaborations between grains to create

unified bodies of sound from particulate individuals, have been conceptualized in myriad

different ways.

For example, Xenakis proposed that granular spectromorphology (the way that the aural

qualities of grains change over time) could be considered as a series of screens stacked

temporally, upon which grains became pixels whose qualities changed over time. For

Xenakis, granular composition therefore opened up new possibilities for spectral

composition, with frequency and intensity as X and Y axes, and duration as a Z axis43. This

conception of granular composition as three dimensional has made modeling a prevalent

concern of its practitioners.

As Phivos Kollias has proposed, Xenakis’ conception of granular spectromorphology can be

read as essentially cybernetic44, forming an organisational system based primarily upon

grains’ qualities of difference (of timbre, frequency and volume) and transformation (through

time).45 However, readings of Granular Synthesis developed further in the emergence of the

1990s’ ‘Independent’ Microsound scene, that lean towards an aesthetic understanding of

grains as constituting models of atomic, cellular or ecological processes; thereby imagining

16

40 I. Xenakis. Concrete PH, 1958

41 Roads, op. cit., p. 64

42 Roads, pp. 14-16

43 P. A. Kollias, ‘Iannis Xenakis and Systems Thinking’, Phivos-Angelos Kollias, accessed 22 January 2015, http://phivos-angelos-kollias.com/papers/2011-Xenakis_Conference.pdf

44 ibid., p. 2.

45 ibid.

granular compositions as inherently organic or material while also narrative.46 Curtis Roads

describes granular composition as:

…About telling a story: The sounds are born, they live, they change, they meet other sounds, they collide; one sound destroys another, they merge together, they get married, they get divorced, become unstable, change identity, mutate and die.47

Within granular composition, this re-imagining of sound into material, the likening of the

resulting ‘grains’ to atoms, and composition of works that sounded somehow like a narrative,

cellular process, were aligned with a cultural attempt to re-imagine data as matter in the

1990s and was often organised around discussion and debate the Microsound48 email forum.

Indeed, around the same time as Independent Microsound came to the fore, there was much

discourse concerning the likening of binary code to genetic code, following the rise of the

virtual, which was seen to be materially and politically detached from ‘the real.’ As Cadence

Kinsey writes:

This precipitated a crisis in theories of human-machine interaction (…) which saw numerous theorists attempting to map a supposedly disembodied interaction with this abstract plane of representation of code. Such ideas further intersected with the then emergent knowledge of genetics, resulting in a perceived equivalence between binary and genetic code that aggravated the critical discourse to the point where the human subject was also considered to be in crisis.49

Such equations of data or code as analogous to nature clearly had traction in the aesthetics of

atomic, particulate or cellular granular compositions, in which grains, or clouds of grains, are

programmed to interact in ways that are modeled after organic, ecological or chemical

processes. As has already been argued earlier in this paper, the likening of technologies to

nature is integral both to the corporate representation of computing and networks, and also

as a result, to the cultural imagination of those technologies. Therefore, the engagement of

17

46 J. Demers, ‘Minimal Objects in Microsound’, in Listening Through The Noise, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, pp. 69-90

47 ‘Curtis Roads: Getting Granular’, Online Video, 2014, accessed 22 November 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buoTb83cxjM

48 Microsound, Website, accessed 29 January 2015 http://microsound.org/

49 C. Kinsey, ‘From Post-Media to Post-Medium: Rethinking Ontology in Art and Technology’, in Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology, C. Apprich, J.B. Slater & O.L. Schultz (eds.), Mute, London, 2013 p. 69

Microsonic works with a process of modeling organic forms and systems can be read as a

response to these concerns.

It is important to add here that a key aesthetic concern of much Microsonic work is to

perform these material processes in a reified atmosphere away from any obvious aural

signifier or referent; Joanna Demers has noted that Microsound has been criticized for its

refusal to explicitly engage with politics due this lack of aural referents.50 However, she

counters that this refusal may in fact constitute an ideological attempt to produce music that

signifies in and of itself, without relying on discursive or textual interpretation. She writes

that: “Once music relies on spoken or written language, it becomes subject to interpretation

and misinterpretation […] Microsound might thus represent less an effort to avoid

signification altogether than an idealistic attempt to preserve music’s ability to signify.”51

In a similar fashion, Mitchell Whitelaw’s paper, Sound Particles and Microsonic Materialism,

argues that the positing of sound-as-material in Microsound risks misrepresenting its own

compositional meaning;

…in performing [a] rhetorical merger between matter and data, microsonic audio is misrepresenting the real and important relationship between those two terms which is at its core. What marks this audio culture out is its exploration of the very rich and immediate interface between the informational domain of digital signal processing and the material domains of acoustic sound, listening, embodied experience, physical presence and awareness. Whatever bit-friction may be occurring inside the computer is only meaningful as it radiates out into real space. Microsonic data materialises as it reaches the speaker-cone, becoming sound.52

So, for Whitelaw, the materiality of the sound-particle can only exist aurally, and therefore,

its representation as a metaphorical, material signifier of digital data is confused, since for

him data cannot be considered material; he argues that: “a bit is not an atom”53, and also that:

“the sound particle is a figurative distraction from what’s most interesting here: the circuits

and interfaces of data systems with sound, embodied experience, and culture.”54

18

50 Demers, op. cit., p. 88

51 ibid., p. 89

52 Whitelaw, M. (2003). Sound particles and microsonic materialism. Contemporary Music Review, 22(4), p.98.

53 Ibid., p.97.

54 Ibid., p.98.

However, Whitelaw’s reading of the materiality that prevails in Microsound, relies upon a

position in which the virtual and the real are considered to be entirely separate. As discussed

earlier, this divide has collapsed (or at least, has begun to), and notions of embodiment and

materiality have widened to include performative online presence, image-objects55 and

coercive subjectification. Within this temporal frame, Whitelaw’s claim that the sound

particle is a ‘figurative distraction’ away from issues of embodiment and data circulation

start to break down, and granular modeling processes can offer new opportunities and

useful metaphors for performing networked self-hoods and bodies.

While the works of Microsound perform a reification of sound away from referents and

signification in a way that validates Whitelaw’s argument; there is a current proliferation of

practices that use granular techniques to perform manipulations upon the voice, which as a

key signifier for the body, reconnects the granular work to the political.

Whitelaw’s concern that the culturally important interface of the body with technology is

bypassed in Microsound, is addressed in these new granular works. The collapse of distance

between the body and data means that now, the materiality of data, is that of our own flesh

and labour. These practices - as exemplified by the artists that are the subject of the following

case studies - attempt to occupy either the mutable, fluid and swarming forms of the

culturally imagined network; or by retouching and smoothing over, using aural prostheses to

fill in the blemishes of the organic voice, make visible the hyper-real of popular culture’s

representation of the body.

Swarms: The Granular Network-Voice of Holly Herndon

One of the most prevalent uses of granular and FFT processes in recent vocal practices has

been the manipulation of the voice away from its original gender, timbre or to extend it

beyond its organic abilities. As is typically the case (and similarly to the development of

Independent Microsound), the proliferation of these practices has coincided with widely

commercially available software and hardware that allows such transformations to be

achieved outside of institutional settings. Software such as Pure Data, Max/MSP and more

19

55 A. Vierkant, ‘The Image Object Post-Internet’, Rhizome, December 20th, 2010, acccessed 4 January 2015, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2010/dec/20/required-reading/

recently Max for Live have provided invaluable tool to easily perform complex granular

vocal processes without the need for coding or elaborate mathematical understanding.

Hardware tools such as TC Helicon’s VoiceLive pedals provide black-boxed technologies that

enable layers of harmony and pitch-manipulation to be added to vocals. Musicians such as

Planningtorock, The Knife, Gazelle Twin and Katie Gately all employ these techniques to

produce voices that are modulated beyond their female-sounding original. The manipulation

of gender in female and queer vocalists’ practices has often previously aimed to access a

male voice, and in doing so occupy the political power and authority that the male voice

represents: one of the earliest practitioners of vocal gender bending was Laurie Anderson,

who named the male persona in her work the ‘voice of authority.’56

In the work of Holly Herndon however, we find an extension and modification of these

approaches, in that although she does extend her voice into alternative genders and sonic

identities, these identities are untethered from binary gender performances and aural bodies

that are identifiably human. Through granular and spectral Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)

processes, Herndon creates multitudes of sound-objects and timbres that concomitantly can

be heard as chattering networks, stuttering cyborg voices and breaths, or impossibly multi-

sexed bodies.

In her composition ‘Breathe’57, a track on her debut album ‘Movement,' Herndon explores an

augmentation of the breath, using spectral freezing techniques to stutter the sounds of

gasping, sucking, and exhaling air. The opening moments of the piece hear a sharp intake of

breath being shortly followed by a lower-pitched, stuttering granular shadow of this breath

that slowly fizzles out. A silence ensues inferring that the breath is being held. When this

breath is finally released with a relieved sigh, the deeper shadow coughs and shudders

again. This respiratory rise and fall is repeated continually through the work, and each

repetition spawns new layers of stuttering, resonating, croaking and swirling sound-bodies

that extend beyond the parameters of Herndon’s original voice.

These augmentations follow clearly programmed patterns and rhythmic structures, but are

slowly joined by more stochastic (random and dynamic) granular clouds and reverberations.

Eventually each intake of breath initiates its own complex systems of sound-bodies that

20

56 R Goldberg, ‘Laurie Anderson’, Thames & Hudson, London, 2000, p. 58.

57 H. Herndon, ‘Movement’, CD, RVNG intl., New York, 2012.

glissandi between high and low frequencies in myriad voices. Through all of this however,

Herndon’s natural voice remains at the center of focus, clearly audible. Towards the end of

the piece, there is a crescendo of activity, as multiple cloud-voices and stuttering freeze-

framed voices come together for a climactic scream, forming a dense and dissonant, yet

unified body for a moment before a sharp release, then shrinking apart into individual,

spluttering sound-bodies and slowly fading out.

The majority of these forms remain identifiable as abstractions emanating from a voice; there

is an organic quality to the stutters and swirls of each sound-object, a dampness that suggests

the mouth, the throat, saliva. This is achieved by Herndon’s careful consideration of sound

design; while granulation is used to abstract, network or freeze the voice, the sonic outcomes

of these processes retain enough of the grain of the voice, or the sibilance of the mouth, that a

body is still detectable. It has been noted that some of these sounds resemble the artifacts of

glitches in streamed media or Skype video calling58 , when the smooth flow of a digital

transmission breaks down.

What is immediately noticeable in Herndon’s work is that in comparison to the ‘minimal’59

sound-objects of Microsound, the aural bodies of Herndon are rich in signifier and referent.

Whereas the cloud forms of microsound are treated purely in terms of duration, volume and

frequency; Herndon’s insertion of the voice, a clearly identifiable and politically weighted

signifier into similarly structured compositions performs an engagement with the real, and

with exactly the issues of embodiment and data circulation that Whitelaw argued were

bypassed in Microsound. Indeed, Herndon has stated that her practice is “[an attempt to]

find a fleshiness in digital music.”60

In her postgraduate thesis entitled Embodiment in Electronic Music Performance61, Herndon

agues that the use of a voice also aids the comprehension of intent in performance:

21

58 L. Zoladz, ‘Rising: Holly Herndon’, Pitchfork, 2012, accessed 25 January 2015 http://pitchfork.com/features/rising/8990-holly-herndon/

59 Demers, op. cit.

60 A Borkowski, ‘Song Of The Digital Flesh: Vocal Manipulation & Our Cyborg Selves’, The Quietus, 2014, accessed 2 January 2015 at: http://thequietus.com/articles/15223-vocal-manipulation-holly-herndon-burial-katie-gately

61 H. Herndon, Embodiment in Electronic Music Performance, MA Thesis, 2010, accessed 9th January 2015, http://soundpractice.tumblr.com/post/24921349896/embodiment-in-electronic-music-performance

Studies have shown that when a subject understands the intent of an action, they

are much more responsive to that action […] the fact that it is unnecessary to

observe the goal is parallel to not understanding how a certain sound manifests

from a perceived input. One may not understand the electro-mechanical

processes involved, but an empathy is established. Personally when I see a finger

moving on a laptop, I understand an intent and empathize. For illustrative

purposes, however, I prefer to look at the use of the voice as a clear physical

gesture that most people will understand. This [research] would suggest that

witnessing a voice interact with electronics, whether distorted beyond

recognition or simply rounded out by, say, a reverb effect in a concert hall, allows

the audience to understand the act of incorporation through a gesture they may

relate to their own bodies.62

Herndon’s qualification of her use of the voice as a relatable signifier with which to

communicate intent affirms the political aspect of her work; the ‘incorporation’ of the body

into the technologies she performs with.

Here, Herndon’s extension of the breath with granular and spectral FFT processes (she uses

Max/MSP to run granular patches to achieve these processes) brings the body’s interface

with technology squarely into question. If the voices of Breathe emanate from a body, they

certainly don’t emanate from an entirely human one. Rather, Breathe produces a cyborg body,

whose gasps and sighs form networks of chatters and clouds of resonances that billow

around it, independent of their origin. Herndon’s work can therefore be read as expressing a

networked body situated within the fluid and dynamic ‘boundary condition’ of the interface

described by Hookway, wherein negotiations between the body, technology and the network

extends and augments notions of embodiment and subjectivity beyond the physical and

22

62 ibid., p. 20

gendered bounds of that body. In creating aural networks and cloud-voices, it is arguable

Herndon performs a body that becomes-network, or becomes-cloud.63

It is important to note that by subjecting the voice to granular processing, and so becoming-

cloud, not only does Herndon create aural networks that can be heard to signify a networked

body, but she does so by subjecting the cohesive input of her voice to a process of division,

distribution and analysis. It may not be too significant a conceptual leap to argue that

Granular Synthesis creates not only aural-metaphorical networks, but also creates rhizomatic

networks of data from unified source material within its computational architectures.

Granular Synthesis itself could therefore be viewed as a network technology itself.

Interpreting Granular Synthesis in this way refocuses the practice of modeling, away from

organic simulation and toward use as a model of the fluid and mutable network itself.

Holly Herndon’s diffuse and multiple voices then, perform a modeling of the body after the

forms and architectures that computation and the internet are represented and culturally

imagined to take, and in doing so, re-inject a political, referent dimension to the lexicon of the

granular. The next case study, of pop musician Hannah Diamond’s work, will unfold the use

of granular vocal processing to construct an idealized, Baudriallardian hyper-real body that

addresses issues of affect and representation in the context of performative and networked

social reality that has been discussed earlier in this essay.

23

63 While Cybernetics, as was briefly discussed earlier in this paper, deals with transformations and difference as organisational principals in a way that has informed previous understandings of granular compositions in Xenakis; the argument for a performative ‘becoming network’ or ‘becoming cloud’ is influenced here by the writing of queer performance artist Paul Hurley whose series ‘Becoming Invertebrate’ saw him perform becomings of invertebrate bodies in an attempt to:

“Replace human identity with an interspecific performativity [is] to go some way towards destabilizing the autonomous Cartesian subject and mobilizing an ex-centric subject always in process.”

-P. Hurley, ‘On A Series of Queer Becomings: Selected Becomings-Invertebrate 2003-2005’, Rhizomes, Issue 11/12, Fall/Winter 2006, accessed 6 February 2014, https://soundcloud.com/199uk/199-dont-know-much

Aural Prosthesis, Sonic Concealer: The Perfected Body of Hannah Diamond

A feature of Post-Internet64 practices has been the response to public sharing and private

trade of personal narratives online by occupying the forms and tropes that social media

constructs, often resolving into a performative subversion or fracturing of their own online

identities, brands, and chronologies. These practices are most often concerned with textual or

image-centric production and circulation online, in which the key marker of value is it’s

share-worthiness.

Amalia Ulman is probably the most prominent Post-Internet artist to engage the online

social-image economy in this way. Her Instagram series, Excellences and Perfections65, saw her

spend three months carefully constructing a persona and posting ‘selfies’ of herself from the

position of an idealized, consumerist fantasy dream-girl. She posted selfies that purported to

show her having had breast augmentation, following a strict diet, going to pole dancing

classes. In return, she garnered a sizable online following, and was rewarded by her images

being shared about in earnest by Instagram users who believed in her façade. In doing so,

she uncovered the way that:

The power relations on social media simply mirror those at play in the world at

large. Powerful, savvy people are powerful, savvy social media users. Even while

power is leeched away from traditional mass media and the established art

world, social media too often reproduces or even amplifies the same kinds of

cultural values seen in those spheres.66

24

64 “Post-Internet Art” is a term coined by artist Marisa Olson and developed further by writer Gene McHugh in the critical blog “Post Internet” during its activity between December 2009 and September 2010. Under McHugh's definition it concerns “art responding to [a condition] described as 'Post Internet'-when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality. Perhaps ... closer to what Guthrie Lonergan described as 'Internet Aware'-or when the photo of the art object is more widely dispersed [&] viewed than the object itself.” There are also several references to the idea of “post-net culture” in the writings of Lev Manovich as early as 2001.

-Vierkant, op.cit.

65 A. Ulman, ‘Excellences and Perfections’, Online Artwork, 2014, last accessed 9 February 2015, http://instagram.com/amaliaulman/

66 M. Connor, ‘First Look: Amalia Ulman-Excellences & Perfections’, Rhizome, 2014, accessed 6 February 2015 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/oct/20/first-look-amalia-ulmanexcellences-perfections/?ref=tags_amalia-ulman_post_readbtn

The work of Hannah Diamond, a pop musician and artist based in London, employs similar

aesthetic devices of the privileged and superficial fantasy-girl. Her music is glistening,

astringently sweet pop, which pushes the trope of the innocent, cute pop star beyond belief.67

Released online for free, and attracting huge numbers of downloads (her song Attachment

had been played more than three hundred thousand times at the time of writing), Diamond’s

work is not only pop, but hugely popular.

Although, she does, in reality, have a high voice, Diamond’s music employs the use of the

advanced auto-tuning software Melodyne68 to smooth out and modulate her voice towards

timbres that are closer to a general MIDI saxophone than that of a voice.

Melodyne works by a process called ‘Local Sound Synthesis’ which functions by granulating

an original sound, and then inserting new synthesized grains into that original for stretching

and tuning. This kind of insertion could be read as an aural prosthesis or cosmetic

intervention; a breaking down of the voice, resolving into a new body in a polished

collaboration with the synthesized data added by the software.

Melodyne is primarily used for correcting tuning within pop music vocals, and Diamond’s

work performs a kind of obscene extension of this perfection. The software functions to make

her voice incredibly high, squeaky clean and brittle, more Vocaloid69, 70 than human. The

effect is that of a veneer breaking down, being polished right through, a voice that is so thin

it no longer obscures the digital architectures beneath it. Diamond’s voice here functions as

inverse and antithetical to that of the coercive female voice discussed in the first section of

this essay; rather than smooth over an unstable system in crisis, this voice and its failure to

be at all convincingly organic, indexes the tools of its production into each of its intonations.

Here, Diamond’s work performs an occupation, a redirection of the mode of polished popstar,

making its surface permeable, her identity too-obviously a construction. In doing so, she is

questioning the role of the (female) body, voice and identity when both can be constructed so

entirely and potentially without the agency of the performer in question. Diamond employs

25

67 H. Diamond, Pink and Blue, MP3, P.C. Music, London, 2014, Accessed 5 Jan. 2015 http://pinkblue.pcmusic.info/

68 Melodyne, Website, las accessed 8 February 2015, http://www.celemony.com/en/start

69 Yamaha, ‘Vocaloid Singing Software’, accessed 15 November 2014, http://www.vocaloid.com/en/

70 ‘AniMiku Vocaloid Concert Live at Tora-Con’, Online Video, accessed 20 December 2014, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=fB9hWyaEkGc

what artist Kate Cooper, who also works in the virtual rendering of female bodies, although

primarily as a visual artist, refers to as “…the language of hypercapitalism.” Cooper states

that:

“It’s very interesting just getting your hands dirty in finding your own agency within this

glossy language, to be able to produce it yourself […] When working with this technology, I

always feel there’s a kind of hacking element to it.”71

Indeed, Diamond herself states that her Pop persona is a “kind of hyper-real version of

myself”72 influenced by the aesthetics of early 2000s music videos, which she argues were

“starting to reference technology as being really sexy, but the images were also starting to

become really technical themselves.” However, as in Amalia Ulman’s practice, Diamond also

exemplifies the role of the ‘Hot Babe’ that artist Hannah Black has described: “Once, only the

professional Hot Babe adorned all major media outlets; now social media makes of everyone

a Hot Babe, should they be willing.”73

The figure of the Hot Babe unveils further the coercive game that is at play in social media; a

basic and flat performance of availability and attraction. Within the ‘like economy,' the most

successful players of this pick-up game are the Hot Babes that perform a fantasy combination

of a sexualized yet perfected innocence and purity that Ulman and Diamond both engage

with. It is arguable that in occupying the role of the Hot Babe, these artists unfold a nascent

perversity inherent to these economies.

By making permeable an idealized, hyper-real, blemish-free façade, Diamond’s work unveils

the technological apparatuses that support normative power structures in social media.

Diamond uses granular processing of her voice to perform a critique of the tools that are

used to produce and propagate sonic identities, and idealized bodies after the internet.

26

71 J. Ugelvig, ‘Kate Cooper: Hypercapitalism and the digital body’, DIS Magazine, 2014, accessed 2 November 2014, http://dismagazine.com/dysmorphia/66668/kate-cooper-hypercapitalism-and-the-digital-body/

72 ‘HDTV01 - Who Is Hannah Diamond?’ Online Video, 2015, accessed 9 February 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZdJ8P1HAVA

73 H. Black, ‘Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Hot Babe’, The New Enquiry, 2014, accessed 12 January 2015, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/further-materials-toward-a-theory-of-the-hot-babe/

These case studies illustrate two processually aligned yet aesthetically differing strategies for

aural critiques of the status of the body after the internet. While Holly Herndon’s work uses

granular tools to perform a structural critique of the cultural imagination of the form of the

network, Hannah Diamond’s work uses a similar granular processing to enact a critique of the

coercive subjectification that social media both produces and relies upon. In the concluding

chapter of this essay these critical approaches toward composition and sound design, will be

situated alongside efforts to comprehend the underlying material and oppressive contexts in

which images and subjectivities are generated and distributed online.

The New (Granular) Aesthetic

Without a concerted effort to raise the level of debate, we just loop over and over through the same

fetishizations and reifications, while the real business of the world continues unexamined. Those

who cannot understand technology are doomed to be consumed by it […] Technology is political.

Everything is political. If you cannot perceive the politics, the politics will be done to you.74

-James Bridle

In The New Aesthetics and its Politics, James Bridle argues that a willful lack of comprehension

of everyday technologies equates to an inability to perceive political power, as that power

increasingly radiates from “black-boxed, corporate-controlled objects, platforms and

services”75, and that these impervious objects and services are replacing open source,

decentralized and empowering technologies. An example of this power dynamic is the

influential role, described in the work of Harry Sanderson and discussed at length above,

that corporate representations of computation and networks as weightless and amorphous

play in obscuring from view the exploitative and oppressive economies of production.

As a response to this urgent call for a better informed understanding of quotidian

technologies and their underlying power structures, the present reading of Granular

Synthesis as a network technology itself, bears particular relevance. As has already been

discussed, whereas the earlier works of Microsound used the processes of granulation to

27

74 J. Bridle, ‘The New Aesthetics and its Politics’, in You Are Here - Art After The Internet, O. Kholeif, Cornerhouse, London, 2014, pp. 20-27

75 ibid.

produce reduced or minimal sound-bodies76 (that behaved cybernetically but were stripped

of aural referent and signifier)77; the ‘network voice’ of Herndon occupies similar

morphologies whilst retaining its political dimension as pertaining to a body.

Other than the ‘imagined network’ of fluid and amorphous forms that Herndon’s

performance of becoming-cloud sonifies or makes aural, one possible model that could be

understood within a granular network-voice is that of decentralized file distribution. In

practice, swarm distribution technologies such as BitTorrent perform much the same

transformations as those performed upon the granular network-voice. Rather than download

files in a chronological, 'top-bottom' way, which would require full versions of files to be

available on a single server, torrents construct files from small packets of data, using a 'rarest

packet first' rule, from around the p2p network. This means that it is not necessary to have a

fully downloaded version of a file to contribute to its distribution on the network.

In dividing original files into packets, or an original body of music into dispersible bits,

BitTorrent is also dividing or encrypting bodies in a correlative, inverse process to Granular

Synthesis. The dissembled, partial files that torrents produce when incomplete exist as sliced

up versions of the original, and if played result as sound objects that recall ‘glitch’

Microsound's 'aesthetics of failure.'78 Here we can observe a processual metaphor; Granular

Synthesis as network, network as Granular Synthesis. Small traces of original works, spread

through a network, waiting to be whole again.

In decentralizing the distribution of these works, these traces are freely exchanged and

shared, and the value of that exchange is viewed exponentially in relation to the scarcity of a

full seeding of a file. Here sound files can be read as audio versions of Hito Steyerl’s concept

of the ‘Poor Image’79, constituting networks of exchange-value beyond their original

intended value or resolution. The ‘Poor Sound’ is also a useful tool for re-thinking the sound-

bodies of the granular network-voice, reframing them within a discourse of decentralized

sharing, away from that of reified non-signification.

28

76 Demers, op. cit.

77 Kollias, op. cit.

78 K. Cascone, ‘The aesthetics of failure: “Post-digital” tendencies in contemporary computer music’, Computer Music Journal, 24(4), 2000 pp.12--18.

79 H. Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, in The Wretched of the Screen, Sternberg, Berlin, 2012 pp. 31-44

Conclusion

What is being argued for here is a better understanding of the underlying and inherent

systemic and processual metaphors that are at work within the technologies used for the

transformation of voice and body. Note also is that both of the case studies given here, along

with the vast majority of the contemporary practitioners employing granular processes to

perform such transformations are women, or queer. The transformation of the voice away

from original is a historically rich practice that has generally aimed to critique the complex

power structures at play within the voice.80

In transforming their voices to perform becoming-network, or becoming-Hot Babe, Holly

Herndon and Hannah Diamond engage with the cultural imaginary of the female body. In

doing so they begin to access and unfold the power relationships that these bodies are

indexical to; those of gender, sexuality, class and race. Such critiques of the voice speak of

oppression and privilege. As vocal manipulation and transformation are employed to

perform a political and social critique, then deeper understandings of the processes used to

achieve these critiques are necessary. In response, this essay has strived to provide tools to

better discern the network modeling at work in Granular Synthesis and has attempted to

unfold the cultural imaginations of technology’s form, and our bodies’ relationships to those

forms. Granular Synthesis therefore, may provide us with the compositional tools needed to

apprehend or model the networks that our bodies are increasingly enmeshed within.

Word Count: 7, 831

29

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List of Works

Diamond, Hannah. Attachment, 2014

Diamond, Hannah. Pink and Blue, 2014

Dryhurst, Matthew. Dispatch, 2014

Gately, Katie. Pipes, 2014

Herndon, Holly. Chorus, 2014

Herndon, Holly. Movement, 2012.

Lund, Jonas. We See In Every Direction, 2014

Sanderson, Harry. Unified Fabric, 2013

Ulman, Amelia. Excellences and Perfections, 2014

Xenakis, Iannis. Concrete PH, 1958

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