Gabrielle HB

Gabrielle HB is a sound artist working between the unceded territories of Nitaskinan and Tiohtià:ke, known as Lanaudière and Montreal. She uses voice, words, synthesisers and field recording to generate works, oscillating between free improvisation and slow composition. Her album Playing the Daily Scores was presented during the 2020 edition of Suoni per il Popolo festival and she is a member of Le désert mauve and Jardin.

Gabrielle HB, on a show that was so loud, she still remembers its volume

The empathy and respect implicit in consent culture could easily be extended to sound. As digital art and music lovers we’ve gone to one or two shows that were just unbearably loud—and experienced the ringing in our ears hours or days later. In hindsight, isn’t that discomfort, to say nothing of the permanent hearing damage, a violation?

Embodiment and immersion are ubiquitous ideas that we all understand. We desire stimulation and expect it from our digital media. However, perhaps we need to step back from this consumptive mindset and think about the types of experience we want and need, versus always default to the spectacular.

The influence of AI is pronounced on many aspects of culture, but relative to listening it’s a bit more subtle in its influence. If algorithms are now tasked with aspects of mixing and mastering; compressing frequencies to conserve bandwidth; and building our custom-tailored playlists based on mood, previous activity, and demographics, they’re tangibly changing how we listen and what we hear, as well as picking the soundtrack to our lives.

Gabrielle HB, on how promoters could signal how loud shows would be to listeners.

Amanda Guiterrez

Amanda Gutiérrez is a Ph.D. student at Concordia University who uses a range of media, such as sound and performance art, to investigate the aural culture of everyday life. Gutierrez is actively advocating for listening practices while being one of the board of directors of the World Listening Project and serving on the scientific comitée of the Red Ecología Acústica México.

As one of the driving forces in London’s early dubstep scene Steve Goodman (aka Kode9) knows a thing or two about bass music. His interests in dance music were always paralleled by deeper interests in sound as a type of violence, or mode of control, and PhD research he conducted on these topics was the subject of his 2012 book Sonic Warfare. In it, Goodman ties together many twentieth century threads—futurism, militarization, nefarious R&D—to map out the weaponization of sound. “The production of the ecology of fear is intensified under the shadow of ‘shock and awe,’” he writes of technologies like LRAD coming of age in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.

Analucia Roeder

Analucia Roeder is a Lima-based multimedia artist working across documentary, live visuals, generative art, and VR. Currently part of MUTEK’s AMPLIFY D.A. cohort, her 2016 documentary Cocachauca (2016) was awarded Most Innovative Film at Argentina’s CINECIEN and she premiered her first solo VR experience, Inside A at London’s Sommerset House Studios.

Analucia Roeder, underscoring that less is indeed more

Analucia Roeder, suggesting that spectacle is highly overrated

The loudness war is the name of the trend of increasing audio levels in recordings over the last four decades. The shift from analog media to the (digital) compact disk ushered in myriad signal processing possibilities, including enhanced dynamic range compression and equalization, which has resulted in engineers amping up intensity in search of a ‘hotter’ sound. “Waging the Loudness War means finding new and better ways to decrease or ‘compress’ dynamic range, so that a record’s average levels are nearly as high as the peaks,” writes Greg Milner in a chapter dedicated to the ‘wars’ in Perfecting Sound Forever (2009).

Sol Rezza

Sol Rezza is an Argentinean composer and sound designer fusing experimental electronics with immersive audio. A specialist in audio spatialization and digital storytelling, she develops her work in virtual environments and live performances moving between art, psychoacoustics, and technology. Her work has been featured at festivals including CTM Festival & Deutschlandradio Kultur (DE), MUTEK (CA), and File Prix Lux Festival (BR).

Sol Rezza, on how algorithmic ‘optimization’ and ‘streamlining’ are more insidious than we might think

Sol Rezza, on what we give up when we hand the reins over to automated systems

Recently I went to a NASCAR race. I’ve never experienced such a sonic assault; the dull roaring drone of twenty high-powered cars tearing across a concave circuit was physically obliterating. Volume is everywhere. In many situations, it’s beyond our control. As artists, we have the responsibility to use volume mindfully. Sonic intensity is common, but sonic intensity with purpose, deployed conscientiously, with clear markers so that audiences can consent to entering into the experience, is rare.

I appreciated Gabrielle HB’s call to explore a diversity of intensity in electronic music. Our culture seems to take loudness as a default—she referred to it as a “culture of loudness.” Perhaps it’s easy to be loud. It’s shorthand for power. It’s like in visual art—bigger paintings sell. There’s something about presence that captures the market’s imagination, that sweeps audiences away. It’s more difficult to be subtle. Perhaps the pandemic, the kind of interiority that the pandemic has sparked in us collectively, will reveal a more diffuse, quiet, and nuanced end of the sonic spectrum.