Gender, Sound and Architecture

This blog is my virtual archive. It's a collection of ideas and thoughts on the relationship between gender, sound and architecture.

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“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.” Alvin Lucier

[gendersoundarchitecture]

Women’s place, women’s space, a place for women’s mind and talent, out of ordinary, queer, outside of regular, in the dark, outside of time, outside of daily routine, it requires space and perspective, it is silent, it is peaceful, the night is silent, women’s work has physical and bodily dimension, it requires space, and takes physical shape.

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“Lovers with the women listening” (1656) by Nicolaes Maas

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“The listening servant” (1853) by Hubertus van Hove

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“The Eavesdropper” (1657) by Nicolaes Maas 

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“The Listening Housewife” (1656) by Nicolaes Maas 

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In Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film, The Lives of Others, listening devices (bugs, rather than fungi) are embedded into walls, light fittings, and beneath wallpaper in order to eavesdrop on the private sound of suspect citizens. These continue to nest silently under their domestic camouflage, even when the paranoid regime that implanted them has long since disappeared, even when the brain connected to the ears has ceased to exist.

- from the book “Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of Listener” by David Toop

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Walls have ears. 

Sensual set-design from Luca Guadagnino’s movie Suspiria (2018)

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👂🏽“There is more in this building than you can see”👂🏽

Walls have ears. This movie made me think again about the aural architecture and what we might find out when we listen to buildings rather than look at them. 

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Eavesdrop: a place where sound, gender, and architecture meet. It’s a place where power relations are negotiated. It’s a place of potentiality and possibility.  A liminal space. Who has here the power over whom?

“Cardinals Eavesdropping in the Vatican” (1895) by Henri Adolphe Laissement

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Corralled into rituals of consumption and self-discipline that sustain a bloated global market in beauty, diet, fashion and grooming products, three-quarters of women in countries where food is plentiful go hungry every day in an effort to take up as little space as possible

Laurie Panny “Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism”

[gendersoundarchitecture]

- What s the point of the bumhole? - It seems to be that the more space you have, the richer you are. So you are making so much space here so one can get close to you. You will have to walk very slowly anyway because no gentlemen or lady will hurry, servants do that.