WISWOS NEWS

The artist organisations Ting Shuo Hear Say and Women in Sound Women on Sound (WISWOS) have come together to create a call for three UK based women working in sound art and experimental music. Selected artists will be partnered with a female Taiwanese collaborator to create a track for publication on a compilation album in September 2021. The purpose of this call is to create an opportunity for UK based and Taiwan based collaborators to come together for a networking and career development opportunity.

The selected artists will be supported by both organisations to promote their practice through online interviews, media attention, and opportunities to present this project output to an international audience.

Additionally, each artist will receive a bursary of £260 to support their collaboration.
This project is funded by the British Council

Submission detailed and deadline

Please send a 200 word bio describing your practice and interests in sound, a link to a previous sound work and 250 words describing the benefits that such a collaboration and opportunity would have on your practice going forward.

Deadline for submission is the 1st of April 2021. Announcement to be made on the 16th of April 2021.

To download a pdf of this call please click here

Please send application submission to info(at)wiswos(dot)com

WISWOS founder Dr Linda O Keeffe began a summer teaching course in Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) on the 9th of July 2018, she is a visiting Professor at BFSU.

She has been working with female students exploring soundscape studies: the anthropology, sociology and ecology of sound, live coding, audio editing, field recording and graphic score composition. This has also been a fantastic opportunity to meet a number of female Chinese performers and begin to explore women’s access to education in the area of sound and music technology.

This is part of the overall agenda of WISWOS which is to explore education access for women in sound and to examine the innovative ways women come to music and sound technology.

O Keeffe will travel to Brazil to work with Prof Isabel Nogueira from the 25th of July to the 12th of September. While there Linda and Isabel will begin a project called SoundWalking as a Feminist Methodology. They will work with communities of female collectives of music and the arts in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul. They will be presenting a paper at this years Associaçäo Nacional de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduaçäo em Música (ANPOAAM), Applying Feminist Methodologies in the Sonic Arts: Soundwalking as Process. This is the first conference on gender in sound and music education in Brazil.

On August 19th Dr Rebecca Collins will join us in Brazil to begin a series of workshops in schools, a continuation of our Research in a Box project. Linda and Rebecca will continue their research into the archiving of women’s contribution to music and sound. We will also take a lead role in the development of two symposiums to take place at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.

We will post regular news bulletins of our activities in Brazil.

© Photo; Linda O Keeffe, BFSU Class, 2018

© Photo; Linda O Keeffe, BFSU Students, 2018

© Photo; Linda O Keeffe, Wangshengnan performing her set at Fruityspace, 2018

Celebrating Women in Sound, 8 March 2018, Goldsmiths University, London

© Photo; Keelan O' Hehir, Next Wave festival, Testing Grounds, Melbourne, Australia, 2016

We are delighted to announce that the selected artist for our International Women’s Day event, Celebrating Women in Sound, is the collective Sisters Akousmatica. They will perform at the evening concert from 8pm in the Great Hall at Goldsmiths University, for further information about the event see here. Additionally their work will be presented in The Room of Sounds in Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil on the 10th of August 2018.

As Sisters Akousmatica, Dr Julia Drouhin and Phillipa Stafford create curatorial and written projects concerning collective radio practices and auditory-spatial exploration that support and cultivate the voices of women and non-binary people in public space. They have worked to produce large-scale public transmission projects, a retreat for women and non-binary artists, workshops and commissions with organisations such as Mona Foma, Liquid Architecture, Next Wave Festival, the University of Tasmania, 3CR, The Channel, Signal, Radiophrenia and Arts Tasmania. In 2017 their eponymous project Sisters Akousmatica was the recipient of the Community Radio Association of Australia’s Excellence in Music Programming award.

Sisters Akousmatica perform “Chapter One: Signal fantôme ~ Onde fantôme” as part of their ongoing long-form project The Silent Key. This piece will take its script from the first chapter of their NM, SK to be published as part of The People’s Library in April 2018. Chapter One will use field recordings, voice and radio broadcast to examine further the phenomenon of anonymous/clandestine radio broadcast as a vehicle for rewriting/reimagining women's role in sound (art, music and broadcast), explored broadly through The Silent Key. The Silent Key generates its own content and also uses other events and projects as a interrogative, parasitical way of creating and collecting content. The Silent Key was developed with seed funding from South Australian arts organisation Vitalstatistix, through their national hot-housing project Adhocracy. In 2017 Sisters Akousmatica were commissioned by Radiophrenia Scotland to create a new sound work for broadcast, for which we created the first of the Silent Key broadcasts, NM, SK , and by Radio33 for which they created Sisters Akousmatica Radio! (a prelude to the former).

Website: www.sistersakousmatica.org

Work examples:
http://www.sistersakousmatica.org/locate/radio-33-commission/
https://soundcloud.com/radioqueens/radiophrenia-sisters?in=radioqueens/sets/radiophrenia- nm-sk

Celebrating Women in Sound, 8 March 2018, Goldsmiths University, London

To celebrate International Women’s Day 2018, Women in Sound Women on Sound (WISWOS) and the Unit for Sound Practice Research (SPR) at Goldsmiths, University of London are launching Celebrating Women in Sound, a day of sound-related events featuring the work of female-identifying artists, to be presented at Goldsmiths on 8 March 2018.

The purpose of International Women’s Day is to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women; perhaps more importantly, the day is a call to action to change the shape of society and to push for gender parity in all areas.

WISWOS is dedicated to creating opportunities to showcase the impact of women in the field of music and the sound arts. This day of events aims to highlight the work of women in all sound related areas through a day of concerts, workshops, listening posts and talks, and the presentation of a new or previously unheard piece by a female identifying, femme or non-binary composer/sound artist.

The work selected will be showcased at the closing concert of Celebrating Women in Sound, on 8 March at 8PM in the Great Hall of Goldsmiths. The piece will also be performed at the Women, Sound and Music Symposium at the Institute of Arts, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil in September 2018. The selected artist and their work will be featured on the WISWOS website, with a page dedicated to their practice and work.

For further information about submitting, please visit here.  

WISWOS founder Dr Linda O Keeffe being interviewed about Research in a Box: A Toolkit for Researching Women in Sound. You can listen to the full interview here;  

As part of WISWOS’s remit to explore innovative ways to reach out to girls and find ways to shape their education experiences of sound and technology, WISWOS founder Linda O Keeffe spent two days working with 15 girls from Nottingham Girls Academy. This project was supported by the New Art Exchange (NAE) Gallery in Nottingham, where they provided space, technology, admin support and funding for the two days. Saziso Phiri from NAE was one of the women who helped make this workshop happen.

On day one the girls explored sound walking and field recording around Nottingham, designing sound maps and learning about the history of listening and recording techniques particularly as it relates to environmental sound, urban soundscapes and noise.

On day two, we explored the history of graphic scores, implementing ideas developed in day one to create graphic representations of sounds. The girls designed their scores for voice, and at the end of the session performed their compositions as a group. Finally they worked with a granular synthesis application to remediate their performance.

The girls were fascinated with the work of Pamela Z and Candaş Şişman and insisted that we watch performances of their work the whole way through, which contradicts the latest ideas that young people have small attention spans as a result of mobile media use. At one point they insisted they be allowed watch a 9 minute performance of SYN-PHON by Candaş Şişman.

The day was a great success and we are looking forward to Nottingham Girls Academy trialling our Research in a Box: Activating Women in Sound toolkit, very soon.

Read the article written in the online magazine the Conversation

WISWOS members Dr Linda O Keeffe and Dr Rebecca Collins will present a paper at the Irish Sound, Science and technology Conference this September titled Research in a Box: A Toolkit for Researching Women in Sound. This is the first time WISWOS will present an academic paper on its activities in a conference.

In September 2017 we launched the Research in a Box toolkit at Lancaster University, the box funded by Lancaster University is a loanable toolkit available for schools within the UK to borrow. The box aims to encourage research within schools linked to research taking place within universities and elsewhere. Our Box is called Activating Women in Sound in a Box and is both a physical box, see image below, and an online toolkit. Contributors to the box include women who have created video tutorials in areas including instrument building, the history of women’s contribution to music technology, working with live coding software and studio engineering - Eva Petersen, María José Ibarbo and Nina Richards.
In addition, we have created an online research space of women’s writers in the area of sound studies, music technology and the sonic arts, this space was developed by Linda O Keeffe, Joanna Helms, Diana Chester with the support of Tony Doyle. This space will support researchers, artists, educators and students who wish to locate female authors in a wide variety of sound fields.

This September are launching the new and improved WISWOS website, working with the composer and web developer Tony Doyle, a long time WISWOS network member. We developed a space that would showcase all the activities of WISWOS from our London events activities to our Lancaster Symposiums, our online Research in a Box project and our research space.

In May of 2017 WISWOS posted a list of female authors on sound to make visible women’s contribution to the field of sound studies. The response to this list was phenomenal, it has been shared over 20,000 times and to this day it has been dowloaded over 15,000 times. As part of the Research in a Box project (see below), currently under development, WISWOS decided to develop an online interactive space expanding on the list. Two women, Joanna Helms and Diana Chester took on the role, alongside web developer Tony Doyle, to generate this space, which will be made accessible in September when WISWOS will launch its new website. Please read their mission statement below.

The Women In Sound / Women On Sound Reading List aims to construct a resource of written, sonic, and visual materials created about and by women who work with sound. The Reading List began as an informal collection of resources compiled for a music-related masters program concerned with the underrepresentation of writing by and about women in the field. First launched in conjunction with the WISWOS Research in a Box project, the List continues to grow and serves as a resource for students, educators, and researchers. The List strives to be inclusive and representative of women working in and on Sound from around the world, in a myriad of languages, in both historical and contemporary settings. In working toward this mission, our aim is to build a well-rounded collection of materials on women in sound so that no educational program will lack the resources to develop balanced, intersectional gender representation in their own reading lists. The Reading List will be launching a public submission form in September 2017 to solicit resources and input on how to further shape the scope and depth of the collection.

Diana Chester is an artist, musician, technologist, and educator. Her work draws from sound studies, archival studies, and ethnography. Her research is focussed on the sonic nuance of religious traditions and festivals around the world. Diana holds a BA from Mount Holyoke College, an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the University of Porto.

Joanna Helms is a musicologist and educator with research interests in music and sound production for broadcast media and the early history of electronic music. Joanna has presented work on the development of sound effects on early American radio at the National Broadcasting Company, and on new media and participation in the promotion of contemporary classical music in the US and Europe. She is currently writing a dissertation on mid-twentieth-century electronic music production at Italian state media network Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI).  Having played and taught flute for many years, Joanna has more recently taken up electric bass. She has also been active as a fundraising committee member and camp band manager at Girls Rock North Carolina, and previously organized concerts, lectures, and participatory events as a co-founder of the Experimental Music Study Group in North Carolina’s Research Triangle area.

We are delighted to announce the three women who have been commissioned to create video tutorials for our Research in a Box project, Activating Women in Sound. They are Eva Petersen, María José Ibarbo and Nina Richards. These women will be designing a series of video tutorials for our new website, which will be launched as part of a larger education program for secondary schools in September 2017. See below information about women and tutorials.

  Tutorials Video
Eva Petersen
The British Female Pioneers of Electronic Sound Part One: Delia Derbyshire
The British Female Pioneers of Electronic Sound Part Two: Daphne Oram
Eva is a visual artist, composer, vocalist and performer. In 2002, Eva founded Liverpool band The Little Flames as lead singer, and was signed to Deltasonic /Sony BMG. The band toured the UK, Europe and Japan with The Arctic Monkeys and The Coral and released their album The Day Is Not Today (released 2016) to critical acclaim. In 2012, Eva released her solo album Emerald Green Eyes, a collaboration with guitarist Will Sergeant from Echo and the Bunnymen, to critical acclaim. Eva has also been commissioned to produce recordings by Mojo magazine and filmmaker John Davide, and she is currently writing an album due for release December 2017.
Eva lectures on the BA (Hons) Fine Art and History of Art undergraduate degrees at Liverpool School of Art and Design, Liverpool John Moores University and is working toward her PhD at the university. Her practice-led thesis is entitled Voices of Winter Palace: A Practice-led Exploration of the Visibility of Women in Sound.

  Tutorials Video
Nina Richards
Nina has designed a simple PCB for the sound making kit that's based on an old design known as the Stepped Tone Generator. In this video, Nina will demonstrate basic soldering techniques in the process of showing you how to assemble the sound making circuit. Once soldered together, this can be used to make experimental sounds.
Nina has always been interested in electronics, computers and making music. Recently, she's been designing and building electronic music synthesiser modules that are sold all around the world and used by noteworthy musicians.

  Tutorials Video
María José Ibarbo
These video tutorials are aimed to encourage women of all ages to know about Live Sound, what it is to be a Sound Engineer, and to inspire them to become one by showing them what other female Sound Engineers have achieved.
María José Ibarbo is a current second year Music Technology Student at Leeds Beckett University from Colombia, South America. In her 2 years living in the UK she’s volunteered for Sofar Sound Leeds, a non-profit organisation that runs free secret music events, at Latitude Festival on 2016 and Live at Leeds on 2016 and 2017 as a Backstage Assistant.
Her passions have always been becoming a FoH engineer and touring all around the world, and becoming a producer in her home country to help promoting Latin American talent, but most of all, learning about ways to empower women through sound. She’s been recently accepted into WAM’s (Women’s Audio Mission) Studio Internship Program in San Francisco, U.S., where she hopes to learn how to get more women into the industry.

‘Research in a Box’ is a loanable kit aimed at GCSE or A-Level school students that fits in with the appropriate curriculum and at the same time showcases resources used by researchers. The aim is to inspire the next generation of researchers and to aid in the transition of pupils from school to University.’ (Lancaster University)

The aim of the box is to first, make practical interventions into the current pedagogical apparatus for the teaching of sonic technologies in schools, and second, to interrogate and generate the construction of virtual and physical sites of knowledge exchange on gender, sound and technology.

Discussions and focus groups with young women and teenagers at the WISWOS symposia, which began in 2015, indicated that girls felt the model for the teaching of technology and music was inherently gendered and excluded their participation with these subjects. Recent research shows that it is increasingly clear that existing ideologies of gender and technology are being absorbed into pedagogical constructs shaping the teaching of music technology and influencing the perception of technology in general.

The loanable box will contain a series of toolkits for would be noise makers, tutorials on sound design, instrument building and live coding. We will also be commissioning women makers and composers to create tutorial videos for young girls to access, which will be located on a dedicated learning website. The boxes will be available from Lancaster University from September 2017.

Linda O Keeffe, Rebecca Collins
With thanks to the core network for consulting on this proposal

Updated list as of June 20th 2017

So the reading list has been updated, and authors will be appended to it every so often. I want to say a huge thank you to those sending us authors lists, its incredibly helpful as this is a big job.  We are currently negotiating with several people to work on this project in an official capacity, and a web developer to create a searchable space on the WISWOS website over the summer: a wiki of female authors on sound and music. This will be taking place next to a total redevelopment of the website as we engage with secondary schools with our new project, A toolkit for activating women in sound in a Box.  This group will be responsible for collecting and helping archive this information. More news on this to follow after the 21st of April.

We are so excited by how enthused the response has been to this idea and how valuable a resource this list will be to artists, composers, researchers, technologists and educators. Our hope is to create a space where you can locate female authors who have contributed to the widest variety of fields and disciplines in sound and music.  But in the interim please feel free to download our current document and browse the authors and publications.

Women_authors_2017

Update:

We now have live tools that include a searchable table to view the current list along with other visualisation methods to encourage exploration.

I am delighted to say that WISWOS is starting a new project of collecting and making visible women authors in the fields of sound and music. Our list is not exhaustive and we hope to grow it through writers or readers sending us in new or old published works for us to showcase.  To add a reading to the list please use our submission form here. To read the current list please download The PDF here

We are looking for someone to take on the more difficult task of turning this list into something searchable, grouped by genre or style. So if you are interested in being a part of the WISWOS network and taking on this role please contact us

Update:

We now have live tools that include a searchable table to view the current list along with other visualisation methods to encourage exploration.

WISWOS are delighted to promote this series of events taking place to promote the life and works of Delia Derbyshire.

Electronic music charity Delia Derbyshire Day (DD Day) have just announced an exciting heritage project that will celebrate what would have been the 80th birthday of electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001). Delia's output was extensive and very varied though she is most famous for her realisation of the Dr Who theme for the BBC in 1963. Delia's archive was donated to the University of Manchester in 2007 and is now housed at John Rylands Library. DD Day consider this a rich source of electronic music heritage that deserves to be celebrated, explored and learned from.
With Heritage Lottery Fund support, DD Day will offer a series of public events and activities that will bring the archive to life, unlocking the heritage through the arts. Acting as a platform for female artists past, present and future, Delia's fascinating archive, work and working methods will be explored to make new music and inspire music lovers and makers of all ages.
By animating the archive in partnership with John Rylands Library, we will engage the public with this unique heritage of early electronic music through 2 educational short films, a "Deliaphonica Soundbank" (an interactive web platform), 3 public events (DD Day MCR 10 June 2017, DD Day at Full of Noises Festival 5 August 2017 and a DD Day/DWAN symposium event in December 2017) and participatory activities (hands-on music making workshops for families and an 8-week education project in 2 primary schools), all inspired by Delia and her working methods.
To follow the HLF supported Delia Derbyshire 80th birthday electronic music heritage project and get involved in events and activities you can find DD Day at:
http://deliaderbyshireday.wordpress.com/
http://www.facebook.com/DeliaDerbyshireDay
https://twitter.com/DeliaDDay

WIWOS has submitted a funding bid for the Lancaster research in a box grant.

‘Research in a Box’ is a loanable kit aimed at GCSE or A-Level school students that fits in with the appropriate curriculum and at the same time showcases resources used by LU researchers. The aim is to inspire the next generation of researchers and to aid in the transition of pupils from school to University.

Linda O Keeffe and Rebecca Louise Collins have designed a call to develop a tool kit for teenage girls in school that we hope will bring on board a number of female composers, sound designers, instrument makers and coders. Fingers crossed we get this. Our initial goal is to introduce girls to instrument building with the support of instrument maker Nina Richards.

So after 6 months of travelling, researching, writing, sweating blood and tears, sometimes literally, myself and Rebecca Louise Collins have finally submitted our grant application to the AHRC for a networking grant with WISWOS. We have a bunch of fantastic people who have helped us put this together and who have come on board as part of the WISWOS network. This includes Lisa Busby from Goldsmiths, part of our London WISWOS collective, Liz Dobson of the Yorkshire Sound Women's Network, Andrew Deakin of the Octopus Collective, composer Tony Doyle, Lilian Campeseto and Isobel Nogueira of Sonora in Brazil, Milena Droumeva from Simon Fraser University in Canada. We all have our fingers crossed that we get this grant because it will mean the creation of a boatload of ideas, art works, commissions, festivals, workshops, websites, symposiums etc.

A sample of our call is below to let you know some of what we plan to do if we get this grant approved

The overarching aims of this international network are three-fold: first, to critically engage with and influence existing knowledge structures within sound-based institutions, namely the British Music Collection (BMC), second to make practical interventions into the current pedagogical apparatus for the teaching of sonic technologies in schools, and third, to interrogate and generate the construction of virtual and physical sites of knowledge exchange on gender, sound and technology.

• Working with the BMC archive to unlock lost histories and create responses to women´s contribution to the history of the sonic arts
• Working in schools with teachers and young girls to create a transferable methodology of technological gender inclusion, which can be adapted and applied to other contexts, nationally and internationally
• Create a space for knowledge exchange through events, symposia and networked connections, to reflect on the projects we have undertaken and workshop our future projects. The entire project is using poststructuralist feminist models or iterative engagement.

Last summer I travelled from Lancaster to London, Huddersfield to Leeds and Barrow in Furness. I met with women artists, sonic arts collectives and researchers, collecting stories and experiences to consider where WISWOS goes from here. I have attached a document I wrote about what people shared with me and where WISWOS should go in order to support women in sound. Having met with the artist and researcher Rebecca Louise Collins at Leeds and having discovered a great working collaborator I decided that together we would put together a research application for the AHRC networking grant to create a two year project networking with national and international researchers. The title of our project is Women in Sound Women on Sound: Legacies of the Invisible.

Read Notes on a Journey Wiswos travel Mission ST.

Interviewed by Alea Balzer on NTS radio about WISWOS this month, really nice piece to support the event. If you want to hear the full interview check here. She also plays some really great tracks, so listen to those as well.

The British Music Collection has asked us to select two presenters from the symposium to contribute an essay or paper for the launch of their new website, these papers will be part of the Spotlight collection. The idea of a Spotlight article is that the writer focuses on an artist in the Collection whose work they find interesting.

Update:

Dr. Rebecca Collins had a paper selected for this.