Contemporary Music Review

ISSN: 0749-4467 (Print) 1477-2256 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/gcmr20

Gender, Creativity and Education in Digital Musics

and Sound Art

Georgina Born & Kyle Devine

To cite this article: Georgina Born & Kyle Devine (2016) Gender, Creativity and
Education in Digital Musics and Sound Art, Contemporary Music Review, 35:1, 1-20, DOI:
10.1080/07494467.2016.1177255

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Contemporary Music Review, 2016
Vol. 35, No. 1, 1–20, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1177255

INTRODUCTION
Gender, Creativity and Education in
Digital Musics and Sound Art
Georgina Born and Kyle Devine

This special issue examines the politics of gender in relation to higher education, creative
practices and historical processes in electronic music, computer music and sound art.
The starting point is a summary of research findings on the student demographics
associated with the burgeoning of music technology (MT) undergraduate degrees in
Britain since the mid-1990s. The findings show a clear bifurcation: the demographics of
students taking British MT degrees, in comparison to traditional music degrees and the
national average, are overwhelmingly male, from less advantaged social backgrounds,
and slightly more ethnically diverse. At issue is the emergence of a highly (male)
gendered digital music field. The special issue sets these findings into dialogue with
papers by practitioners and scholars concerned with gender in relation to educational,
creative and historical processes. Questions addressed include: What steps might be
taken to redress gender inequalities in education, and in creative, compositional and
curatorial practices? How can we combat the tendency to focus exclusively on the
‘problem of women’ while at the same time ignoring the challenges posed by the marked
styles of masculinity evident in these fields? Is the gendering of electronic and digital
musics and sound art evident in certain aesthetic directions? And what musical futures
are augured by such imbalances?

Keywords: Music Technology; Gender; Electronic and Computer Music; Sound Art;
Creativity; Education; Mediation

Introduction

Either critical scholars in antiracist, feminist cultural studies of science and technol-
ogy have not been clear enough about racial formation, gender-in-the-making, the
forging of class, and the discursive production of sexuality through the constitutive
practices of technoscience production themselves, or the science studies scholars
aren’t reading or listening—or both. (Haraway, 1997, p. 35; emphasis in original)

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

2 G. Born and K. Devine
This special issue examines the politics of gender in relation to higher education, crea-
tive practices and historical processes in electronic music, computer music and sound
art. It stems from two sources. First, it represents an extension of and a response to
Born and Devine’s (2015) research on music technology, gender and class in contem-
porary British higher education—a study that is itself an offshoot of Born’s larger
research programme, ‘Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary
Music Studies’ (MusDig).1 In Born’s MusDig ethnographic study of digital art
musics2 in several British universities and other key sites (e.g. conferences, festivals,
performances and funding bodies), it became clear that there was a pronounced gen-
dering both of practitioners and of student populations. These findings about gender
took up a theme of Born’s (1995) earlier research on computer music, and her current
ethnographic observations were quantitatively confirmed when we analysed a data-set
from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) along with figures from
the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). The UCAS demographic data cover
five years (2007–2011) of undergraduate student populations on both traditional
music (TM) degrees and music technology (MT) degrees across 12 broadly represen-
tative universities.3 They show that the TM student population is very roughly
balanced in terms of its gender profile (55% female to 45% male), in accord with
the national average for all undergraduate students in the period of the study, while
the MT student population is approximately 90% male.4 The MT degrees instance,
moreover, both a lower social class profile and slightly greater ethnic diversity than
the TM degrees. These findings have led us to enquire into the historical and social
formations that have shaped the present topography, and also to question what
these divergent demographics imply for the future of digital musics in the UK.5
We presented a summary of this research at the opening of a half-day panel on
gender at the New Instruments for Musical Expression (NIME) conference at Gold-
smiths, University of London in the summer of 2014, which is the second source of
this special issue.6 We believe this was among the first panels, if not the first, to
focus on issues of gender in the important scientific, artistic and professional gather-
ings manifest in the annual electronic and computer music conferences—in itself a
striking point.7 In bringing this analysis to the NIME community, we used the remark-
able gender imbalance registered in our research as the platform for a discussion about
contemporary creative processes in terms of technological design and use, educational
settings, and performance, installation and compositional practices. The panel
included position papers by a range of scholars and practitioners and stimulated a
wide-ranging discussion. Together with the panelists and audience members, we
addressed questions such as: What steps might be taken to redress gender inequalities
in education, creative and curatorial practices in these fields? How can we combat the
tendency to focus exclusively on the ‘problem of women’ while at the same time ignor-
ing the challenges posed by the marked styles of masculinity evident in these fields? Is
the gendering of digital musics and sound art manifest in certain aesthetic directions
and/or technological developments? And what kinds of musical and music-technologi-
cal futures will take shape if the gender imbalance is allowed to persist? Panelists and
 Contemporary Music Review 3
discussants adopted constructive but critical standpoints, leading to a productive and
rich session, while confirming that there are no easy answers—an insight evident in
Haraway’s robust criticism, quoted at the start of this article, of dominant strands in
even putatively ‘progressive’ science and technology studies (STS) for ignoring the
challenges posed by feminist scholarship as well as by questions of race and class.8
We are pleased to present here versions of all the NIME position papers, as well as
several additional papers that we commissioned to address related topics. Our inten-
tion is to place the issues addressed in this Contemporary Music Review high on the
agenda of the international fields of electronic and computer music and sound art,
since they have languished too long, with the goal of fuelling further debate and pro-
gress on these critical issues.

Music, Technology and Gender: Archaeologies of Devices and Genealogies of

Discourses
One of the main questions that arose for us, in light of the strong gendering of the MT
degrees, is: How do such educational, social and aesthetic formations take shape? That
is, generally, how do social relations get into musical practices, music technologies and
their user populations? In the context of NIME, and the field of computer–human
interaction to which NIME is connected, key insights come from studies of technologi-
cal design. We invoke perspectives from STS in suggesting that actors are drawn into
technological assemblages not only at the stages of testing or use, but through the social
imaginaries that inform product conceptualisation and design (cf. Oudshoorn, 2003).
The interest here lies in the kinds of social relations that come to be immanent in tech-
nological designs themselves. As Akrich (1992) and Woolgar (1991) have argued, the
development phase of technology is a key stage in which designers ‘script’ certain envi-
saged usages, more or less consciously or intentionally, into their devices, in this way
‘configuring’ user identities and preferring certain patterns of use.
Assumptions about gender pose a problem in this context, as has been shown by
Oudshoorn, Rommes and Stienstra (2004) in their empirical research on the creation
of new information and communications technologies (ICTs). Through comparative
case studies of the design cultures of two online ‘virtual’ or ‘digital cities’ developed in
the public and private sectors in the Netherlands, Oudshoorn et al. find that the ICT
designers in both cases work with a troubling ‘I-methodology’ (2004, p. 33). Thus,
while these designers aim to create technologies with all-embracing appeal and usabil-
ity—to configure the user as ‘everybody’—a key slippage is evident in their guiding
notion that they themselves, and their own subjective and corporeal experiences of
technology, represent this universal user. Since ICT designers are predominantly
male, I-methodology hinders their ability to address the potential (and actual) diversity
of the eventual population of users, so that the resultant technologies, emerging from
gendered conditions and assumptions projected as universal, embody and entrench
existing norms—prominent among them gender norms. In their words,
4 G. Born and K. Devine
The dominance of the I-methodology … resulted in a gender script: the user who
came to be incorporated into the design of [ICT] matched the preferences and atti-
tudes of male rather than female users. As almost all designers were male and tech-
nologically highly competent, they made [ICT] into a masculine technology.
(Oudshoorn et al., 2004, p. 44)9

To design technologies and interfaces that respond to real social diversity, then, Oud-
shoorn et al. argue that I-methodology, along with its universalising projections, must
be reflexively acknowledged and consciously changed.
Oudshoorn et al. offer a powerful cautionary tale relevant to designers of new instru-
ments for musical expression. And indeed, there is evidence that the NIME commu-
nity and the field of music technology in general are not exempt from these processes.
Pioneering in this regard was Essl’s (2003) foundational critique of the first and second
NIME conferences with respect to gender—which he developed by probing the pro-
blematic assumptions of the emergent field. Essl notes that men outnumber women
in NIME-related design and compositional contexts, adding that ‘the theoretical
work in new music interface technology in recent years is almost exclusively ungen-
dered’ (2003, p. 23). One effect of this ‘marked absence of documented gender aware-
ness’, he argues, has been to reinforce stereotypical binarisms such as man/woman and
nature/technology (Essl, 2003, p. 19), thereby resonating with the problems of I-meth-
odology. As an antidote, Essl propitiously uses the work of feminist and poststructur-
alist critics, notably Haraway and Judith Butler, to stress the potential for NIME to
become a space in which gender unawareness and binary presumptions could be
pried open—discursively, practically and musically—in order to enable the kinds of
posthumanist boundary experiments and human–technology hybrids envisaged in
Haraway’s (1991) visionary ‘Cyborg manifesto’ to emerge and hold sway. Over a
decade ago, Essl therefore powerfully articulated the challenge for NIME to pioneer
by mounting a critical institutional transition away from the gender unawareness
prevalent across electronic and computer musics—a challenge we intend this special
issue to underscore, extend and revitalise.10
In suggesting that social relations and social imaginaries can be scripted into tech-
nological assemblages through design processes, we are not making an essentialist or
determinist point; nor are we implying that actual users are constrained to follow
the scripts inscribed into the technologies. As Akrich and others have argued, the
eventual uses made of any technology cannot be read off the design assumptions;
instead, they can and often do entail a break with or a détournement of projected
uses.11 Thus, in the same way that gender identities are themselves performed, and
potentially fluid and varied, as opposed to inherent, and therefore fixed and universal,
as feminist criticism has established (e.g. Butler, 1990, 1993), neither are scripts or
user-configurations wholly determinant of the actual socialities of interaction or the
material assemblages that incorporate technological objects. Rather, we are suggesting
that wider social relations, on the one hand, and practices of technological design and
interaction, on the other, exist in relations of mutual constitution. In other words, they
infiltrate and mediate one another, cohering as techno-social assemblages.12 Our
 Contemporary Music Review 5
suggestion here is based on Born’s fourfold ‘planar’ theory of the social mediation of
music. In her words:

In the first plane, music produces its own diverse socialities in the guise of the inti-
mate microsocialities of musical performance and practice. … In the second, music
has powers to animate imagined communities … In the third, music refracts wider
social identity formations … In the fourth, music is entangled in the institutional
forms that enable its production, reproduction, and transformation. (Born, 2012,
pp. 266–267)

The technical design process, with its studio-based armoury of practical tests, ques-
tionnaires and online surveys, can be understood to operate within the first plane of
Born’s model; that is, design processes entail social interactions equivalent to
music’s microsocialities. According to Born’s model, each of the four planes has a
‘certain autonomy’, while the relations between them are dynamic and mutually con-
stitutive.13 Indeed, what we have identified here is one way in which the third plane—a
plane of wider social identity formations manifest in categories of social difference
such as gender (but also class, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality)—gets into, and med-
iates, the first plane—here, the socialities of design practices. These mediations take
place through problematic processes such as I-methodology, meaning that the
context of design practice—which is all too easy to envision as a small space of inter-
action that is somehow isolated from wider social and historical forces—is in fact a
consequential domain of and site for musical politics, one in which existing cultural
categories, as they relate to social inequalities, can be inflected, reproduced or even
amplified. It follows, as Born highlights, that the temporalities evident in these
mediation processes must also be scrutinised: ‘in as much as mediation refers
to transformational processes, it ineluctably signals questions of temporality: the
relative endurance or stability of certain socialities or aggregations, as against the
unstable or fleeting quality of others’ (2012, p. 268). In this light, the gendered
mediation of contemporary (music-)technological design shows an astonishing
capacity to endure.
In drawing attention to such processes, we aim to encourage all those engaged in
music-technological design and practice—at NIME and beyond—to register this
greater social complexity in terms of the ways that wider social relations of gender
(but not limited to gender) mediate both the design and the use of new interfaces
for musical expression. In other words, the scripting processes that shape the affor-
dances of new music technologies can be said to mediate and materialise various
social and historical forces, with political consequences (cf. Born, 2011). In identifying
such mediations, we move beyond the I-methodology paradigm in technological
design; but we also move beyond those STS analyses of mediation that focus exclusively
on the first plane—without recognising the interferences set up by the other three
planes. Here we intend to counterbalance descriptive tendencies in certain schools
of STS in which questions of politics may be undeveloped or even ignored. Although
this is an established critique (e.g. Asdal, Brennna, & Moser, 2007; MacKenzie &
6 G. Born and K. Devine
Wajcman, 1985; Sterne & Leach, 2006; Winner, 1993),14 it is salutary to invoke Peter-
Paul Verbeek’s work on the politics and ethics of technological design. Verbeek (2006)
argues that STS scholarship should enter into a more direct and mutually constitutive
dialogue with engineering discourse and design practice, thereby developing a critical
and reflexive paradigm in which ‘the ethics of engineering design should take more
seriously the moral charge of technological products and rethink the moral responsi-
bility of designers accordingly’ (p. 379).15 Given the interactions between the first and
third planes of mediation in the context of music-technological design, if one of our
goals in this journal issue is to forge paradigms of practice and scholarship that are
more responsive to social differences and the pluralisms of music as culture—and,
more specifically, informed by the politics of gender—then one way to get there is
by reflexively reconfiguring the practice of design and its scripting of the ensuing
technologies.16
Another key perspective suggests that the gendering of the music technology field
and of musical interface design refracts wider processes of social differentiation
linked specifically to women’s relations with technology, and especially the gendering
of the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.17
Wajcman, a leading feminist STS scholar, offers a summarising argument:

In contemporary Western society, the hegemonic form of masculinity is still

strongly associated with technical prowess and power. … Notwithstanding the
recurring rhetoric about women’s opportunities in the new knowledge economy,
men continue to dominate technical work. … These sexual divisions in the
labour market are proving intransigent and mean that women are largely excluded
from the processes of technical design that shape the world we live in. (Wajcman
2010, p. 145)18

Wajcman highlights how processes of social exclusion and differentiation are linked
not only to the microsocialities of design, but to larger historical and cultural
rhythms. Indeed, such processes also manifest at the institutional level (the fourth
plane of Born’s model). In this regard, Green (1997), Armstrong (2011) and other
researchers in the sociology of music education have shown how girls and women
are subject to systematic exclusions particularly in relation to educational programmes
in music technology, as borne out also by our research on MT degrees, in this way
institutionalising the gendering of music technology in both secondary and higher
education. Others are now researching how key women composers in the history of
electronic music and sound art have been denied equal institutional standing to
their male peers, invariably being consigned to the historical margins, while earlier
studies show a pronounced gendering of the very institutional division of labour sup-
porting composition in leading computer music centres.19
Green, Armstrong and other writers have also shown how gender is manifest in
unequal treatment within the microsocialities of classroom settings (the first plane
in Born’s model). For example, the theory of ‘indirect discrimination’ suggests that
gendered preconceptions inform how teachers interact with and assess their students.
 Contemporary Music Review 7
This can result not only in subtly divergent assumptions about what counts as musical
skill and creativity, but also in more obvious deployments of ‘discrete critical vocabu-
lary[ies]’ for men’s compositions (seen as ‘virile’ and ‘powerful’) and women’s com-
positions (‘delicate’ and ‘sensitive’) (Legg, 2010, p. 142; cf. Green, 1997, 2012).
Additionally, as Armstrong notes (2011, p. 119), technologically oriented classrooms
and compositional spaces are often discursively, atmospherically and spatially male-
dominated, making these areas feel ‘off-limits’ to female students.20 The papers
below by Freida Abtan, Simon Emmerson, Cathy Lane, John Richards, Simon
Waters and Sally-Jane Norman confront these and related issues, describing several
initiatives both inside and outside academia that thoughtfully attempt to open up
the worlds of digital music and sound art to more diverse student and practitioner
populations.
Musical interfaces and instruments also take on significance as vehicles through
which larger musical formations such as genres and their collective modes of affective
identification (the second plane in Born’s model) become gendered fields of practice.
Indeed, notes Green (1997, p. 176), ingrained cultural expectations exist in which both
electronic and loud instruments are considered somehow more appropriate for boys
than girls. The gendered social imaginaries that take shape surrounding specific instru-
ments and their sonic textures thus contribute to the creation of unequal gender
relations in particular music genres. More specifically, scholarship has shown that
men have dominated the technologically oriented worlds not only of electroacoustic
composition and the classical avant-garde, but of rock, hip hop and—as Hannah
Bosma, Tami Gadir and Christabel Stirling show in this issue—a range of popular
and crossover electronic genres, among them dubstep, glitch and DJ-based dance
music cultures.21
A final perspective stems from cultural–historical analysis of the metaphors and
stereotypes that underpin the foundation of what Rodgers (2010b) calls ‘audio-techni-
cal discourse’. With this concept Rodgers calls attention to the ways in which seemingly
straightforward acoustical metaphors—such as conceiving of sounds as ‘waves’ and
‘individuals’—have been mediated by ‘the perspective of an archetypal Western,
white, and male subject’ (2010b, p. v). Her analysis of the gendered epistemology of
sound is a kind of historical complement to our arguments about contemporary
design practices and I-methodology, on the one hand, and institutional and edu-
cational discrimination, on the other. For Rodgers highlights the sedimented historical
processes through which human subjects and cultures as well as scientific discourses
and technological artefacts become mutually constituted through their convergence
on and participation in shared sets of foundational metaphors. Holly Ingleton and
Marie Thompson, in their essays here, extend Rodger’s approach by examining
tone, pitch and timbre (Ingleton) and noise (Thompson). In distinctive ways, both
writers argue that these fundamental and apparently neutral acoustic parameters
play key roles in the gender politics of digital music and sound art.
In the view of the editors of this special issue, then, it would be unwise to search for a
single explanation for, or solution to, the gendering of contemporary digital music and
8 G. Born and K. Devine
sound art. Rather, we witness a confluence of mutually mediating forces and processes,
and they cross all four planes of Born’s model. While this means that the exclusionary
architecture of such gender politics is sturdy and potentially self-reinforcing, there is
also a much more hopeful message: the assemblage-like character of these relations
means that real change can begin anywhere, and that critiques and initiatives intro-
duced on one plane have the potential to reverberate across all of the others.
But a further step is necessary here. For while we advocate non-essentialist accounts
both of music technologies and of gender relations, we would demur from those per-
formative feminist approaches to the gendering of music-technological assemblages
that, by analogy with certain strains of Latourian STS, conceive of this in the terms
of gender categories being ‘continually constructed, negotiated and renegotiated on
an everyday basis [so that] their (so-called) constitutive attributes can be contested’
(Ormrod, 1995, p. 36).22 Indeed, what is striking about the historical and present-
day evidence about the gendering of music technologies as well as the gendering of
music composition is that, despite historical change and the continuous exercise of
individual and collective agency and resistance, certain gendered features of both
domains tend repeatedly to recur, to stabilise and to endure (cf. Citron, 1993). We
therefore urgently need to develop and adopt theories, beyond concepts of performa-
tivity,23 that can account both for flux and resistance, and for endurance—and a
gender politics of technology that builds on these realities.

About the Papers

The papers in this special issue fall into three main groups: critical—and sometimes
personal, auto-critical—reflections on gender politics in relation to creative, edu-
cational, professional and other institutionalised practices in both academic and
non-academic settings (Emmerson, Lane, Richards, Abtan, Waters, Norman); histori-
cal excavations of the gendered ideologies that subtend contemporary creative prac-
tices and discourses (Ingleton, Thompson); and analyses of the gendered mediation
of aesthetic qualities, creative practices, producer identities and audience formations
in diverse genres including glitch, dub reggae, techno, dubstep and grime (Bosma,
Gadir, Stirling).
The first group of papers brings questions of creative practice into dialogue with the
contributors’ experiences in various institutional, educational, professional and non-
academic settings. Indeed, a key issue in several of the papers is that of the boundary
between academic and non-academic contexts and cultures: how the two broad
domains differ, and what each affords, regarding the gendering of music-technological
practices.
Addressing the professional and institutional centreground, Emmerson examines
reflexively the politics of gender in relation to the history of two of the foremost pub-
lically funded British electronic music organisations between 1979 and 2004, in both of
which he was centrally involved: the Electro-Acoustic Music Association of Great
Britain (EMAS) and, from 1989, its successor, the Sonic Arts Network (SAN).
 Contemporary Music Review 9
EMAS’s mandate was to evaluate and enhance composers’ access to electronic music
facilities in the UK. Yet by examining the minutes of EMAS meetings, Emmerson
observes that a key dimension of access went largely unaddressed: gender. Indeed, he
registers the total absence of women committee members from 1979 to 1989, noting
that despite ‘sometimes intense and heated discussions on “inclusion and exclusion”
in the organization’s policies and practices … gender issues were never substantially
discussed’. Even after the organisation’s metamorphosis into SAN in 1989, and the
appointment of the first of an increasing number of women board members through
the 1990s, as well as the significant contributions made by a few women composers,
a gender-balanced committee membership never materialised. Emmerson offers no
easy answers for this scenario, recognising the centrality of ‘technology’ in the compo-
sitional realms serviced by EMAS and SAN and citing research suggesting that a focus
on technology, as a stereotypically masculine domain, may present a problematic
barrier for women entering the field. He concludes with guarded optimism, suggesting
that the gradual expansion of eletroacoustic music ‘into a much wider diversity of sonic
arts practice’—a diversity that, crucially, for Emmerson, is less centred on technology as
such—has contributed to ‘a redefinition of the field … subverting any combative need
[for women] to “break into” the original, much narrower area’ (his emphases).
In marked contrast, Lane discusses a series of recent feminist initiatives in the uni-
versity contexts in which she has taken on leadership roles. These projects aim to build,
and positively institutionalise, knowledge about women’s contributions as musicians,
composers, artists and feminist activists, in this way counteracting the institutionalised
absence of women from the prevailing histories of music and sound. Among them
are the Her Noise archive and the postgraduate initiative Sound::Gender::Feminism::
Activism, both of which revolve around questions of gender in sound-based arts,
while also cultivating international networks of researchers and practitioners
working in these areas. The mission of the archive, she writes, in addition to its cur-
atorial function, is to ‘create new work, contexts, exhibitions and formats for
sharing and developing this research … as well as developing [feminist] perspectives
that can challenge and enrich the common assumptions and orthodoxies of sound
arts practice, history, theory and curation’. Crucially, Lane notes, despite significant
efforts ‘designed to widen participation … both inside and outside formal education’,
a gender imbalance persists in the contemporary field of sound art. Her conviction is
that the work of Her Noise, coupled with curriculum developments that include man-
datory training in feminist theory, gender theory and queer theory, will help to insti-
gate a ‘seismic cultural shift in the critical and contextual frameworks that surround
sound art, contemporary music and music technology’. Lane’s interventions may be
based in the academy—at the London College of Communication, University of the
Arts London—but they broker creative connections to a number of counter-hegemo-
nic practices beyond academia.
Examining the issue of gender by interrogating the academic–non-academic divide,
Richards outlines how he came to establish Dirty Electronics, a novel form of creative
practice that he has cultivated mainly in non-academic spheres, in which participants
10 G. Born and K. Devine
with any level of previous experience and skill come together to fabricate and then
perform with hand-made electronic instruments. Such a do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos
in electronic music, he contends, is part of a wider cultural shift that has seen the
rise of related movements including hacking, circuit bending and glitch. As a result
of Dirty Electronics’s politics of participation (Bishop, 2006, 2012), Richards notes a
marked levelling of the usual gender imbalance when compared to the gendered
norms characteristic of digital musics in formal educational settings. Taken together,
he suggests, the DIY movements embody diverse reactions against the presets, prefab-
ricated sounds, universal specifications and capitalist appropriation of musical practice
that defined an earlier phase of music’s digitisation (Théberge, 1997, especially
pp. 242–255). Indeed, Richards sees Dirty Electronics as contributing to a musical-
technical politics that aspires to the ‘empowerment of the individual in global, corpor-
ate societies and [the advocacy of] “democracy” on many different levels’.
Abtan’s essay might be read as a counterpoint to Richards. Her argument is that the
discriminatory processes identified in the sociology of formal music education literature
are equally prevalent in the informal, non-academic, DIY social networks through
which circulate the knowledge and skillsets required for successful entry into the crea-
tive realms of digital music and sound art. As with more formal centres of learning, she
contends, these informal networks have social and cultural dynamics that are invariably
gendered male. Abtan bases her analysis both on her experience as an academic teacher
and on her active and sustained involvement in a variety of non-academic feminist art
and technology initiatives, such as Studio XX in Montreal, which focus on the pro-
motion of skills- and knowledge-sharing among women (cf. Valiquet, 2014, especially
pp. 179ff.). Abtan offers an inspirational account of other seemingly simple collabor-
ations, such as a CD-R called Ladies club and the alliance Rock Camp for Girls, which
involve hosting workshops, arranging concerts, making music and, crucially, showing
others how to do these things. Such initiatives, she proposes, can have major impacts
in terms of building a strong community of women in electronic music culture. They
work to launch ‘women musicians into more visible practices where they [are] able
to continue organising the culture they had always wanted to participate in’.
Of course, the gender issues facing the digital music and sound art communities are
not exclusively those of women’s access or participation, or the prevalence of stereo-
types of femininity. As Waters argues in his contribution, there are also myriad pro-
blems facing these fields with regard to the reproduction or intensification of
certain entrenched styles of masculinity. In response to this situation, he develops a
strongly anti-essentialist set of reflections on the constructedness and potential fluidity
of gender divisions and gendered subject positions across music education, the history
and current state of music instrument technologies, workplaces and compositional
spaces. Reflecting on his experiences at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at
Queen’s University Belfast, Waters argues that the various pairings of gender and tech-
nology in such contexts often function in the service of ‘a self-perpetuating narrative of
disempowerment rather than stimulating a recognition of and a positive concern with
difference and diversity’. He thus advocates the creation of alternative, ‘less gendered’
 Contemporary Music Review 11
narratives that depict ‘technology as relational and connective’. In this light, he ends on
a note of determined positivity:

As a twenty-first-century human, I wish to explore the extents and limits of my self-

hoods … . [I]n musicking I can, to an extent, put my ‘self’ into abeyance. Musicking
can afford an inquisitiveness with respect to otherness … and perhaps … engender
plural socialities.

The papers by Ingleton and Thompson take, in part, historical perspectives, furnishing
critiques of the gendered epistemologies of sound that underlie many of the discourses
on digital music and sound art. Ingleton builds explicitly on Rodgers’ earlier work,
developing a critique of audio-technical discourses in relation to concepts of tone,
pitch and timbre. She suggests that these properties of sound have long been construed
through problematic metaphors of purity and natural order, associated not only with
binary categories of gender but also sexuality and race. By drawing on a range of fem-
inist, queer and postcolonial theories, Ingleton argues that pitch continuity and tonal
purity reflect historical norms in which heterosexuality and whiteness were understood
as expressions of a putative natural order. ‘In this way’, she contends, ‘the norms of
bodily transcendence, purity and coherence embedded in dominant definitions of
pitch … can be seen as paralleled by, or transposed from, norms of social organization
materialized in hegemonic representations of “white masculinity” and “white feminin-
ity”’. Ingleton then weaves this perspective into an analysis of an installation by Kim
Gordon and Jutta Koether which, she argues, challenges the ideologies identified in
the earlier part of the essay by performing a ‘blasphemous detuning’ of pitch and
timbre as sonic parameters.
Thompson develops a broadly parallel critique of the normalised associations
between sound and gender, but she focuses on a different keyword in audio-technical
discourse: noise. She begins by showing how numerous negative female stereotypes
—‘shrieking and hysterical madwomen, deadly sirens, meddling gossips and hectoring
scolds, to the “toxic” twitter feminists’—have throughout history been articulated to a
particular politics of sound. Whereas ‘bad women’ succumb to an ostensibly ‘natural’
noisiness, ‘good women’ are understood to know how to control their auditory pres-
ence. In contrast to this normative paradigm, in which ‘noise’ is made legible against
the backdrop of a patriarchal audio-technical discourse, Thompson re-inscribes the
term with a positive, productive political potential. She finds backing for such a
project in a reading of Shannon and Weaver’s classic model of communication,
suggesting that noise has the capacity to blur boundaries between otherwise apparently
stable categories, and that this quality allows it to work against the essentialisms and
binarisms that undergird apparently ‘natural’ associations between noise and negative
stereotypes. Indeed, Thompson charts recent endeavours in which noise figures pro-
minently as a way of combatting the ‘invisibility and inaudibility of female musicians,
sound artists and producers’ in historical and contemporary sound art and other
musics (e.g. the Her Noise project, Rodgers’ Pink noises, and musical compilations
12 G. Born and K. Devine
such as Women take back the noise and Ladyz in noyz). Despite there being no unifying
politics of noise in such initiatives, Thompson argues that ‘noise has some promise
from a feminist perspective: [these initiatives] point to a shift from feminized noise
to feminist noise’. Thompson thus envisages future creative and scholarly work that
would seek to operationalise ‘the generative, transformative’ potential of feminised
noise.
The following three papers address, in distinctive ways, the interrelations between
aesthetic qualities, creative practices and producer identities in electronic and digital
popular or crossover musics. Bosma’s contribution centres on glitch music. She
notes that glitch could represent a source of optimism or subversion in the popular
music sphere, insofar as the genre’s valorisation of an ‘aesthetics of failure’ might
seem to open up alternative perspectives in which audio technologies ‘are staged as
resistant materialities, as multifunctional media technologies with musical and
socio-political impacts’. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the significant contri-
butions to glitch made by certain women artists, Bosma contends that the genre
remains, demographically and symbolically, a male-gendered field of creative practice
that, furthermore, is anchored in longstanding and problematically gendered audio-
technical discourses. As she puts it, ‘Losing control in glitch music is actually at the
service of regaining control—like a phase in the development of the classic masculine
hero’. The answer to Bosma’s driving question—‘Is glitch music allied with a non-
masculine aesthetics and praxis?’—is therefore, for the most part, ‘no’. Yet she
remains open to the possibility that ‘alternative conceptions of glitch … may revitalize
the [genre] and sensitise it to gender’.
Gadir provides an ethnographically grounded critique of the gendering of a different
but related world of technologically-mediated creative music practice: DJ-oriented
dance music cultures, especially techno. Where certain scholars have highlighted the
progressive, inclusive and/or post-feminist politics of electronic dance music (EDM)
cultures, Gadir draws attention to a range of ‘everyday’ DJ and dance practices in
which women are subject to sustained prejudice and harassment. They include: press-
ures for women DJs to conform to sexualised and stereotypically ‘feminine’ presenta-
tions of self in promotion and performance; incredulity towards any idea that women
can be inventive, or even comfortable, when performing and composing with
machines; as well as convictions that certain sonic markers are themselves inherently
feminine and capable of drawing women to the dance floor. Gadir thus attests to the
continued gendering of this globally ubiquitous musical world, suggesting ‘that the
theme of gender liberation propagated by much scholarly writing on dance music con-
trasts starkly with the sexist articulations and behaviours of participants on and off the
dance floor, and behind the DJ booth’.
Extending these themes, Stirling’s paper combines ethnography with historical and
genealogical analysis to argue against the casual essentialisms often evident in popular
music criticism and some scholarship in relation to the male-gendering of the
Jamaican-British genre ‘continuum’ (Reynolds, 2013) that links dub reggae and sub-
sequent genres like lovers’ rock and dancehall to the EDM genres dubstep, drum ’n’
 Contemporary Music Review 13
bass and grime. Arguing that there is nothing inherently ‘masculine’ about key sonic
markers in these genres such as high volume and heavy bass, Stirling develops a
stance akin to Gilroy’s ‘anti-anti-essentialism’ (1993, p. 102),24 fruitfully employing
Ahmed’s (2004) work to analyse how ‘gendered musical attachments and associations
can “stick” for long periods of time, becoming ingrained and resilient at an affective and
bodily level and, thereby, resistant to change’. On the basis of her multi-site London
ethnography of these musical scenes, she shows how gendered assumptions nevertheless
mediate and reproduce inequalities in terms of the prevalence of male audiences and the
male-gendering of performance spaces. The paper is underpinned by Stirling’s dialogue
with DJ/producer Jack Latham, addressing the politics of gender in relation to his crea-
tive practice, and showing how Latham’s reflexive engagement with such issues is
evident in his desire reciprocally to experiment with, and thereby alter, the aesthetic
expectations of the male crowd formations assembled by his music.
Norman provides an afterword that speaks to how this special issue emerged from
the 2014 NIME panel, while forging connections both to our introduction and to the
other papers. Continuing Waters’ anti-essentialism, Norman—a leading transdisci-
plinary creative practitioner who has worked inside and outside academia—addresses
how gender biases can constrict access to technologically-oriented musics, while resist-
ing oversimplified ‘drastic remedies’ such as setting gender quotas in various realms of
musical participation. Citing Bowker’s (2000, p. 15) notion of ‘dynamic uncompro-
mise between agonistic groups’, itself reminiscent of Mouffe’s (2005) conception of
the political—as a space of agonistic struggle, a concept that Mouffe sees as propitious
also for artistic activism (2007)—Norman urges the development of ‘frameworks that
can accommodate … diversity [and that] might allow leveraging of critical and histori-
cal stances to give weight to urgent concerns’. Addressing focally our theme of the
differences and relations between academic and non-academic spheres, she calls for
radical curriculum redesign, as in innovative teaching programmes that would high-
light ‘the importance of sensuous knowledge in the realm of sound arts and sound
studies’, against the conventional focus on histories of technologies, composers and
works. With reference to Schneider’s (2010) ideas about educational invention
beyond the universities, Norman envisages productive iterative flows between insti-
tutions and ‘ek-stitutions’—where the latter are understood as ‘deinstitutionalized
and deregulated spaces such as informal networks, free universities, open academies,
squatted universities, night schools or proto-academies’. It is these ‘border economies’,
she argues, that will engender non-binary experiments, reframing our histories, ortho-
doxies and categories. She summarises her point, and the point of this special issue,
with potency:

If we want to account for the resilience of observed gendering and the reproduction
of imbalanced musical literacies, we need to recognise these differences … avoid
tokenism and fleeting celebrations of simplistic value reversals, and above all con-
tinue working ‘on the ground’, in ways that treasure diversity and complexity.
14 G. Born and K. Devine
Conclusion
What becomes clear across the essays in this special issue is that combatting the gen-
dering of contemporary digital music and sound art involves something more than
widening participation or balancing demographic profiles. Although these are crucially
important goals, by addressing only participation rates and skewed demographics we
confront the surface manifestations of wider, more diffuse and resilient long-term pro-
cesses. The problem, as Valiquet (2013) has put it, is that such efforts risk taking for
granted ‘exactly the kinds of gender binarism and technological essentialism which
are the basis for inequality’. This special issue therefore calls attention to the tenacious
ways in which the gendering of contemporary digital music and sound art is mediated
by wider social and historical processes, and thereby demands an analysis and a politics
that recognise the enduring gendering of these (and other) music-technological
assemblages.
As a complement to efforts at redressing these gender imbalances, including those
detailed in some of the papers, the special issue offers a heterogeneous set of perspec-
tives that converge where scholarship meets political motivation and activism, and
where the transformative potential of ethnographic research and cultural studies
takes flight: in critical genealogies of epistemological formations and audio-technical
discourses, in the excavation of archaeologies of technological devices, and in the
imagination of differently gendered and differently institutionalised aesthetic practices,
educational and creative initiatives. It is through such work that contemporary music
practices and scholarship might achieve the ‘seismic cultural shift’ called for explicitly
by Lane and implicitly in all the essays.
Our goal in drawing attention to the variegated and synergistic social relations and
histories that mediate the minutiae of design contexts, musical interfaces and creative
processes is to encourage and open up spaces for novel, diverse and as yet unforeseen
articulations between subject positions and technological assemblages in digital music
and sound art. ‘The alternative’, Sterne notes, ‘is a sonic monoculture that will be of
relevance to an ever-dwindling set of people and contexts’ (2012, p. 28). Indeed,
through the very discursive designation of existing music technologies and new
musical interfaces as gendered, we and our contributors are ‘informationally enriching’
(Barry, 2005) and politicising those assemblages, performing one crucial moment in
their re-designation, and in this way contributing to their potential transformation.25
If we are less optimistic than we might be, and convey that these issues are urgent, it is
because the political history of this discursive designation is now at least two decades
old.26 Following the NIME panel from which this special issue emerged, we therefore
urge the communities to which this material relates to organise additional initiatives—
in the guise of conference sessions at academic and professional meetings, working
groups, alternative educational fora, collaborative workshops, further research pro-
jects, citizens’ juries and other means—to advance further the reflexive consideration
of the gendering of these musical fields, and how it can most generatively be addressed
and altered.
 Contemporary Music Review 15
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the original NIME panelists and discussants for making the ‘Gender, Edu-
cation, Creativity in Digital Music and Sound Art’ workshop in July 2014 so vital, productive and
enjoyable—with additional thanks to Atau Tanaka, Rebecca Fiebrink and Sally-Jane Norman for
their organisational and other help, and to Alessandro Altavilla for recording the event. We want
to acknowledge our considerable debt to Mark Taylor for providing quantitative and other analytical
skills that were extremely important in the research that gave the impetus for the NIME workshop.
Mark was centrally involved in all three of the events held on this research, and his input and com-
ments throughout were invaluable. David Marquiss also deserves special mention for his early help in
gathering and analysing the data for that study. Kai Arne Hansen was a valuable conversation partner
in the latter stages of drafting our introduction. Thanks, too, to Andrew Barry, Sally-Jane Norman
and Jonathan Sterne for ideas and editorial suggestions.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes
[1] The special issue should therefore be read in conjunction with Born and Devine (2015). For
information on the MusDig research programme, see http://musdig.music.ox.ac.uk/. MusDig
was directed by Georgina Born, funded by the European Research Council’s Advanced Grants
scheme (project no. 249598) and located at Oxford University. All URLs in this article were
last accessed in March 2016.
[2] We use the term ‘digital art musics’ as a problematic placeholder for a wide space of contem-
porary genres associated with or departing from earlier electronic, electroacoustic and com-
puter art musics and sound art.
[3] The sample of 12 institutions includes Bangor University; University of Central Lancashire; De
Montfort University; University of East London; University of Edinburgh; Goldsmiths’
College, University of London; Huddersfield University; London College of Communication,
University of the Arts, London; Manchester University; Queen Mary, University of London;
Queen’s University Belfast; and York University. In making the selection we consulted a
number of senior figures in the field: Michael Clarke, Simon Emmerson, Cathy Lane,
Pedro Rebelo, Thomas Schmidt and Simon Waters. We are very grateful for their help and
advice, though we should emphasise that they are not responsible for the interpretations
and findings presented here. We want to acknowledge the unavoidable reifications manifest
in our heuristic metacategories, TM and MT degrees. But the findings that arise from
making the broad comparison between them in our view justifies their use.
[4] Our findings rest on figures for student acceptances. It is important to note that while the MT
programmes accept more male students in absolute terms, there is a slightly higher acceptance
rate for women, which might indicate both an awareness of, and attempts to redress, the
gender imbalance.
[5] We are able to present here only a snapshot of our larger study. For fuller information on our
data-set, our figures, our interpretations of the meteoric rise of MT degrees, our analysis of the
class dynamics of the two kinds of degrees, and our hypothesis regarding why these bifurcating
demographics exist and the historical conditions favouring these developments, see Born and
Devine (2015).
[6] The NIME gender panel was a follow-up to two previous events held on this research and its
implications: the first, in May 2013 at Oxford University’s Faculty of Music, brought together
16 G. Born and K. Devine
about 30 representatives of the universities and degree programmes in our study; the second,
in July 2013 at St Anne’s College, Oxford, formed part of a three-day international conference
at which we presented the MusDig research to the broad community of scholars and prac-
titioners. Several of the contributors to this issue presented at, or attended, these previous
events as well.
[7] We are therefore particularly grateful to Atau Tanaka for encouraging us to submit a proposal
for the panel, following his participation in the July 2013 Oxford MusDig conference.
[8] Her targets are such STS scholars as Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, Steve Woolgar and Steven
Shapin.
[9] For foundational research on I-methodology, see Akrich (1995). For a comparable perspective
from music studies on producers’ projections of what audiences will respond to, see Hennion
(1989). Both Akrich and Hennion work at the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation, in Paris,
the source of actor-network theory.
[10] Essl’s (2003) analysis of how certain music-technological works and practices exemplify
alternative gendered paradigms remains salutary: he cites in particular Laetitia Sonami’s
‘Lady’s Glove’ performances (see also Norman, 2016) and Pikapika by Tomie Hahn and
Curtis Bahn. Sonami performed a keynote at NIME 2014 in London. For further significant
challenges to gender unawareness in these musical worlds (in addition to those mentioned
below, such as Her Noise), see the female:pressure initiative, a network of female composers
and artists: http://www.femalepressure.net/fempress.html.
[11] The argument is analogous to that made in media and cultural theory about the asymmetry
between processes of encoding and decoding, or production and reception, in relation to
any text (Hall, 1980).
[12] On the concept of an assemblage, see Born (2005, 2012, pp. 267–268):

The concept of assemblage … invokes a ‘multiplicity which is made up of hetero-

geneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them … . [where]
the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987,
69). [It] is characterised by ‘relations of exteriority’ such that component parts
may be detached … and plugged into different assemblages in which their inter-
actions will be different. Each component therefore has a ‘certain autonomy,’
while the interactions between them are non-linear and mutually catalysing,
‘only contingently obligatory’ (DeLanda, 2006, pp. 11, 12).

[13] See Born (2012, p. 267):

The first two planes amount to socialities and social imaginaries that are assembled
specifically by musical practice and experience. In contrast, the last two planes
amount to wider social formations and institutions that condition music, affording
certain kinds of musical practice. Such conditions do not amount to an inert
‘context’: they are folded into musical experience; they both permeate and are per-
meated by music’s intimate socialities and imagined communities.

[14] The opening Haraway quote is indicative of longstanding and continuing feminist criticisms of
STS.
[15] For an example of how Verbeek’s work might be integrated into sound studies to address the
polarised politics of headphones as an audio technology, see Everrett (2014).
[16] One of us (Born) participated in an experimental meeting that attempted to initiate just this
kind of reflexive engagement between critical and feminist STS researchers and engineers, a
project convened at Microsoft Research New England in March 2014 by Nancy Baym and
 Contemporary Music Review 17
Jonathan Sterne. For the resulting statement, ‘A manifesto for music technologists’, see http://
www.musictechifesto.org.
[17] Similar problems of course exist in other fields, too. See, for example, Ratcliffe and Shaw (2015).
[18] Numerous other key studies could be cited here, notably those of Faulkner (2001) and McNeil
(2007).
[19] In addition to the evidence provided by the Her Noise archive (see Lane, 2016), Patrick Vali-
quet is researching the Montreal composer Marcelle Deschennes and Christopher Haworth is
researching the composer Maryanne Amacher in this light. Similar political motivations also
fuel the present ‘rediscovery’ of a series of important women electronic composers, including
Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram and Eliane Radigue. On the institutionalised gendered div-
ision of labour in computer music at IRCAM in the 1980s and 1990s, see Born (1995), par-
ticularly chapters 4 and 5.
[20] For analogous exploration of these issues in relation to women music fans, see Stirling (2016).
[21] On electroacoustic music and the avant-garde, see Born (1995) and Rodgers (2010a). On
popular music genres see, among many examples, Straw (1997), Bayton (1998), Farrugia
(2012) and Leonard (2007, 2015). For reflections on the ambivalent gender politics even of
a politicised rock avant-garde, see Born (2013).
[22] For such a Latourian performative approach to the gender politics of technology, advocating a
‘post-essentialist’ stance, see Grint and Woolgar (1995). For continuing powerful commen-
taries on the problems posed by gender to Latour’s work and Latourian STS, see Sturman
(2006) and Lagesen (2012). A key direction for future work, which we want to register,
might be described as a ‘post-post-essentialist’ movement within feminist scholarship. Such
work is productively returning to and reconstructing questions of biology (e.g. Pollock,
2015; Wilson, 2015), which have long been considered anathema to the social constructivist
proclivities of feminist theory. At this point, exactly what light this new direction will
throw on the relationship between gender and technology remains to be seen.
[23] For the classic statements on performativity, see Butler (1990, 1993), and for later critical revi-
sions to this paradigm, see Bell (2007) and Schep (2012). For a critique of the limits of the
performative turn and related process philosophies in relation to theorising temporality and
historical process, see Born (2010).
[24] We note tentatively here the resonances and tensions that might be explored between Gilroy’s
‘anti-anti-essentialism’ and the emergent ‘post-post-essentialist’ feminist scholarship men-
tioned in note 22.
[25] On this process of politicising technologies, see Barry (2013, especially p. 152). See also the
exciting and much needed new journal, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience (e.g.
Reardon, Metcalf, Kenney, & Barad, 2015), heralding a wave of new materialist feminist
science and technology studies that it is to be hoped will cast new light on the challenges
aired in this collection.
[26] See Born (1995). Symptomatically, for some years after the publication of Born’s book on
IRCAM, occasional online threads in computer music forums debated why the book’s critical
messages regarding the gendering of computer music were not being picked up and discussed
among the computer music community, notably at the annual International Computer Music
Conferences.

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