Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound

"Pink Noises" brings together twenty-four interviews with women sound artists and electronic musicians, including club and radio DJs, re-mixers, composers, improvisers, instrument builders, and performance artists. The collection is an extension of Pinknoises.com, the critically-acclaimed website founded by musician and scholar Tara Rodgers in 2000 to promote women in electronic music and make information about music technologies more accessible to women and girls. That site featured interviews that Rodgers conducted with women artists, exploring their personal histories, creative methods, and role of gender in their work. This book offers new and lengthier interviews, a critical introduction, and resources for further research and technological engagement. Contemporary electronic music practices are illuminated through the stories of women artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds. They include the creators of ambient soundscapes, 'performance novels', sound sculptures, and software for digital audio, the developer of the Deep Listening philosophy, and the founders of the "Liquid Sound Lounge" radio show and the monthly Basement Bhangra parties in New York. These and many other artists open up about topics such as their conflicted relationships to formal music training, mainstream media representations of women in electronic music scenes, and the role of social networking in their careers. They discuss using sound to work creatively with structures of time and space, and voice and language; challenge distinctions of nature and culture; question norms of technological practice; and, balance their needs for productive solitude with collaboration and community. Whether designing and building modular synthesizers with analogue circuits or performing wearing a BodySynth that translates muscle movements into electronic sound, these artists expand notions of who and what counts in matters of invention, production, and noise-making.