Radio-active Monstrosities
This web-audio interface addresses ways of listening to certain female-sounding voices that are perceived as inappropriate - because of the quality of their sound, their gender, the medium's distortions but also stereotypes and collective memories that they often awake. These are verbal expressions that have been associated with forms of 'monstrosity' since ancient times. You are invited to record yourselves, expressing your thoughts and choose a type of distortion to participate in, forming new imaginaries around a technologically-mediated collective voice, which through its monstrosity can reveal other forms of speech.
The interface was made by for the performance "Radioactive Monstrosities", part of the event NL_CL #2 : FLESH : FLESH hosted by iii and Netherlands Coding Live. The voice samples will be part of this platform and future performances. Its conceptualization is an ongoing process related to the research project Let's Amplify Unspeakable Things and previous performances.
Credits: the platform is inspired by Vocable Code. Thanks to Alice Strete, Gert Rietveld, Joana Chicau for sharing references, Amy Pickles for her publication made for the workshop Ecstatic Speech and Alex Roidl for helping with parts of the code. Thanks to the people that contributed and donated their voices:
Web Audio Conference 2021
Performance
During her performance Radio-Active Female Monstrosity Angeliki uses her voice, as well as an online sound archive to play, layer and gradually distort into chaos. The archive consists of recordings from her projects and found material related to female sounding voices and their amplification through media like radio. She has developed a series of command-line tools and scripts that record, archive, transcribe, over-layer, distort and repeat the sounds and her voice. A web-audio interface is used to perform, share the material produced and invite audiences to participate actively. She is wondering about the ways we are listening to certain voices that are often regarded as inappropriate because of the quality of their sound, the medium's distortions but also stereotypes and collective memories that they often awake. Voices that are associated with forms of monstrosity since ancient times. The performance was streamed in Radio on the Radio at Varia and Awkward Introductions Radio at MAMA Showroom.
