Web Audio Conference

Radio-active Monstrosities

In this paper, I describe the artwork Radio-active Monstrosities, a web-audio interface that addresses ways of listening to collective voices and certain female-sounding voices that are perceived as inappropriate or annoying — 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. Visitors of the page are invited to record themselves and choose a type of distortion to participate in, forming new imaginaries around technologically-mediated voices, which through their technical ‘monstrosity’, can reveal other forms of speech.