Resonator from jamie allen on Vimeo.
I’m sitting here digesting a few ideas and basking in the glow of another masterful week of being a student at SMARTlab digital media institute, part of the University of East London, where I got to spend some time with many dear friends taking the academic journey with me.
Some of my recent experiences are starting to change how I think about sound and music in some quite interesting ways. One is the way in which gender bias has crept into my writing, with the critically unchallenged (by myself, until recently) use of only male voices within my academic writing over the course of the last few months.
Another is the sheer scarcity of sound as a material force in my life, having recently been told of probable nerve damage meaning I have lost 60% of my ability to hear sounds of a high frequency, over 20db. This has led to a reconsideration of how I feel about my hearing, about how I want to use it, how I feel about it (well, I hear differently now, not in a worse way…). I have become immediately less tolerant about listening to stuff that overwhelms me. The imperative issue for me right now, is some sense of honing my radar to find challenging sounds that don’t muffle, distort or present too much sonic information aggregated into one place.
To return to the issue of gender bias in my work, I had not considered how exactly this might make a difference to my emerging theory of auditory saccadism – which I am claiming is common to both sexes and in equal amounts. But do I know this for sure? As my work is metaphoric and largely about the ways maths and cognitive science engage the imagination over both the short and long terms, these may have some socio-cultural roots which in turn show up some gender conditioning issues. The important issue for me, like putting actual materials in front of my ears, is to be sensitive to it, and act accordingly.
So what has this to do with suund, and the video above? The video is linked to an upcoming series of workshops that I am hopeful will help widen my knowledge of sound production, gender and culture, it’s the Resonator talks, part of AV10 here in the north east of England. And suund- well, that’s my made up word for a female perspective on sonic arts – uu is the XX of chromosonal gender specificity, as opposed to the normal ou, or XY chromosone…
