Another crucial reading within the course was called “making spaces feminist contacts in sonic arts”. I found this extremely interesting because it analyses women within the sonic art world and how they present themselves.
There is a section in this essay called “L’ecriture Feminine Musicale”, which illustrates the idea that if the sonic artist is a woman they will therefore make “woman’s or feminine music”. This is a theory of Irigaray and Cixious. This theory encourages women to refute masculinist histories. It pushes artists to “write the truth of their bodies” (Blyth, 2004). The concept of feminine music was meant to be a subversive political point to illustrate the embrace of femininity.
She analyses Westerkamp’s Breathing Room, composed in 1990, as an example of écriture feminine musicale. The reading explains that Westerkamp explores her “subjectivity through an insistence of her bodily presence through her work. As such she writes with her body to write her self, as Cixous contends: ‘woman must write her body’ (Blyth, 2004:33) In this piece the binary juxtapositions are explored through technology / nature, man / woman. This composition is concerned with the artists subjectivity in relation to the sonic environment.
This concept really resonated with me and I felt very strongly about embracing the beauty of femininity and not conforming to men’s ways to gain power and respect. I feel that Cixious is telling women artists that if we refute the role that patriarchy imposes, we can thrive through femininity and be proud of the fact we are different from men.
I therefore took this basic principle of embracing this idea and creating “feminine music”. At first I was really passionate about creating something feminine but then got wrapped up too much in the kind of classic feminine sounds.
I therefore went back to basics and considered what femininity personally meant to me, which is the idea of softness and being soothing.
I then created a sound work off this theme that can be listened to called FEM and then attempted a masculine sound scape called M.
Sound As Practice 