Abstract
The amplified voice through podcasting as an intimate aural medium carries with it the possibilities for a deep affective experience for both the creator and the listener. This chapter presents the materialisation of voice as the context for an exploration into queering of gender and sexuality in podcasting through sound production and vocal performance. The author focuses on the aurally affective experiences and performative acts conveyed in the Radiotopia podcast series The Heart—formerly known as Audio Smut—a podcast exploring intimacy and humanity. Through this case study, Copeland argues that as an intimate aural medium, podcasting offers a powerful listening-centred platform to challenge gendered stereotypes and heteronormativities within visual-philic Western culture by engaging with the listener through the affective use of sound.
(tick Boom Boom—tick Boom Boom—tick Boom Boom) it’s the universal sound of human life, of love… and of loves lost ‘Welcome to the Heart’.
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Notes
- 1.
In ‘Do Voices Matter? Vocality, Materiality, Gender Performativity’, Annette Schlichter examines the ramifications of Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity that ignores the performatives aspects of the material voice. From a feminist phenomenological perspective, Schlichter asks what it means to theorise a body without a voice.
- 2.
- 3.
CKUT is a non-profit campus-community station based at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Audio Smut still exists as a show on the station with new producers as a monthly sex-positive, queer-positive radio show.
- 4.
In ‘How podcasting is changing the audio storytelling genre’ (2016), radio scholar Siobhan McHugh notes ‘Movies in your Head’ as a groundbreaking work in experimental audio storytelling (72). Quote pulled from The Heart Website: http://www.theheartradio.org/audio-smut/moviesinyourhead
- 5.
I use the term ‘soundworks’ put forward by media scholar Michele Hilmes in The New Materiality of Radio (2013), as ‘creative/constructed aural texts that employ the basic sonic elements of speech, music and noise; this excludes the field normally encompassed by the term “music,” though of course the boundaries are anything but clear. Typically speech is the dominant aspect of soundwork, with music and noise secondary’ (60).
- 6.
The discussion of Claire de Lune used in films comes from the IMDb online database of Claude Debussy (1862–1918) by calculating the number of films in his filmography as of 10 April 2016 that note the compositions use on their soundtrack.
- 7.
The quote is taken from a critical listening of ‘Kaitlin + Mitra – Wedding’, The Heart podcast.
- 8.
In Sound effects: Gender, voice and the cultural work of NPR, Jason Loviglio discusses the aural attributes common to the female radio voice, ‘The voices of women hosts, presenters and correspondents on NPR’s most widely heard programmes are uncommonly low in pitch. There is a pronounced lack of pitch variance, a kind of disciplined, flat monotone delivery, with few pitch shifts’ (67).
- 9.
I discuss the status and content of Lori Beckstead’s Diversity on Air project as experienced attending a presentation of her work at Podcamp Toronto 2016 held at Ryerson University.
- 10.
Data from: iTunes. Apple Canada, 2015. Accessed 11 December 2015. http://www.apple.ca/itunes/
- 11.
In addition to the biological differences in male and female vocal organs, Karpf as well as Loviglio (2007) indicate a sonic shift in women’s voices over the past fifty years in the Western world. With a focus on broadcast voices in particular, they claim that women’s voices are getting deeper.
- 12.
Season 1 episode 3 of The Heart opens with Prest’s narrative voice speaking to us as if the anxiety, the lack of self-confidence is her own. The use of explicit language and conversational tone draw the listener into her intimate ‘authentic’ voice.
- 13.
danah boyd describes networked publics simply as ‘publics that are structured by networked technologies’ (39).
- 14.
These numbers from Facebook and Twitter were last reviewed and updated on 24 November 2017.
- 15.
Although the Latin term ‘personare’ is mentioned here in text, Greek roots have also been noted by Sendlmeier (2013), as seen on p. 32 in the ‘Introduction’ to Electrified voices: Medial, social-historical and cultural aspects of voice transfer.
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Copeland, S. (2018). A Feminist Materialisation of Amplified Voice: Queering Identity and Affect in The Heart. In: Llinares, D., Fox, N., Berry, R. (eds) Podcasting. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90056-8_11
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