Recalibrating Fundamentals of Discipline and Desire Through the Automatic Music Tent

Abstract

This paper considers the role that discourses of fundamental acoustic parameters, in particular pitch and timbre, have played in the reproduction of a significantly (male) gendered digital music landscape in and beyond the UK. By revisiting a nineteenth-century debate about the definition of tone, which occurred between Georg Simon Ohm and August Seebeck, the paper exposes some of the ways that these foundational audio-technical discourses have been articulated through implicitly gendered, sexualised and racialised discourses. Certain ways in which these discourses have been performed differently are then addressed through Kim Gordon's and Jutta Koether's installation, Reverse karaoke: Automatic music tent (2005), which establishes a creative space where performing and listening function as social events that are transmitted along a specifically queer feminist frequency.