To go completely crazy, that’s what cultural scientist and artist Luca Soudant wanted after completing two master’s degrees in cultural studies. “I no longer wanted to just write, but to get out of that comfort zone and also start working with my hands. Not just reading academically about sound, which is actually quite bizarre, but also doing something with it.”
This is very possible in her workspace at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Soudant started a one-year residency there four months ago, four days a week. It is part of a five-year PhD research project at the Open University into the relationship between gender and sound, the social frameworks that connect sound with notions of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’.
‘Annoying’ ambient noise
Not to the socially conditioned difference between male voice (low, which is considered authoritative) and female (high, subservient), about which much has already been published. Soudant, it is rather about the ‘sonic interaction’ between people and objects, and what it can teach about gender relations. Consider, for example, the silence expected of ‘the feminine’, versus sonic manspreading, sound that allows the social space to be ‘masculine’ occupied. Or the soft tapping of stiletto heels or nails, or advertising for ‘quiet’ vacuum cleaners and other household appliances, promoted because they do not cause women to produce ‘annoying’ ambient noise. Or of course crunching a bag of chips.
Soudant was put on the latter track by manufacturer Pepsi-Co, which wanted to launch new, “female-friendly” Doritos chips on the market in 2018. These had to be chips that would crack less loudly than others, packaged in a bag that easily fits in a handbag. It would be a wish of female consumers, who are more likely than men to be embarrassed by their crunchy chewing sounds. After feminist protests, those chips did not materialize, but the idea did get Soudant thinking – and cracking.
That led to the artistic composition Femmecore (2019), a collage of sound fragments of cracking chips and popping chip bags, which comically challenged social norms about ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ sound. In the magazine Open Philosophy a theoretical elaboration was published, inspired by the work of philosopher Judith Butler, who examines gender as something that you are not static but do, as performance.
Punish gossipy women
In Soudant’s Maastricht studio with high windows there is a work table, an easy chair and a sonic installation spread out, complete with cables, a contact microphone and a dangerous-looking metal construction. A white-green megaphone rests on the windowsill, left over from a demonstration.
That dangerous looking construct, it piece de resistance of the installation, is a replica of a so-called scold’s bridle, a late medieval mechanism that was devised to punish and – literally – silence so-called quarrelsome or gossipy women. The ‘scold brace’, closed around the head, pressed the tongue inward and made speaking impossible. That silence again, the removal of the female voice – and of social space.
Also about the scold’s bridle Much has been written, but one perspective was missing: that of women who had to bear it. What was their experience? Historians are in the dark, because the women themselves left no testimonies. To put it to the test, Soudant asked a craft farrier to make a replica and started wearing it himself. “Five times an hour, that was enough. It’s so uncomfortable.” But it was a learning experience. “You end up in a different acoustic universe. You are silent outwardly, but internally your sound is amplified: swallowing, tongue movements. It gives a completely different experience of your physicality.”
Claiming free-spirited meaning
To expand the sonic experiment, Soudant connected the replica to a contact microphone and a vocoder, a voice changer. The high vibrations picked up and amplified from the object itself evoked in listeners the imagination of “the voices of women who had been silenced.” In a way, they got their voice back that way. For the thesis, which is to become a “para-text” to the sonic experiments, Soudant also interviews people from the bondage and S&M scene who use variants of the curse bar for more pleasurable purposes – and thus claim a free-spirited meaning.
These are examples of sonic interaction that Soudant uses to vibrate the frameworks of social reality until they lose their grip on people and things. This desire for a fluid ontology has a theoretical background in Butler’s feminism and Donna Haraway’s posthumanism. “With sound you can make those boundaries fluid,” says Soudant (who uses the pronouns that/them). “If I play very loud bass tones, your blouse will start to bulge, but the windows will also vibrate. It is about the relationships between people and objects, not about alleged essences of bodies in themselves. Resonance always depends on context, the situation, the source of the sound and the position of the listener.”
Hence the asterisk in “transformation”, a key concept in the research. “The asterisk expresses that transformation is not a linear development from A to a final destination B, but an ongoing process that can go in any direction and may never come to a conclusion or completion.”