16
Conversations in Berlin
Discourse on Gender, Equilibrium, and
Empowerment in Audio Production
Liz Dobson
Statistics documenting gender diversity in music and audio production
have shown audio domains to be overwhelmingly white and cis male
across a range of audio industry sectors (Born & Devine, 2015; Dobson,
2018; Gavanas & Reitsamer, 2013; Smith, Choueiti, & Pieper, 2018,
female:pressures’ facts survey
1
). This situation can reinforce assumptions
that associate masculinity and technology (Leonard, 2017), where women
are believed to understand less while simultaneously being subjected to
a higher standard – to a kind of ‘super-surveillance’ (Puwar, 2004: 92).
Drawing from a series of 18 interviews conducted with Berlin-based
womxn
2
(Gourd, 2018) music producers, this chapter explores some of
the ways in which this male and homogenous space becomes a complex
terrain for women.
The qualitative data is useful as it provides incentives to address this
imbalance, providing a baseline by which to measure change and ammuni-
tion for new initiatives investing in women and non-majority genders, such
as the PRS Foundation Keychange initiative,
3
and the Spotify and Sound
Girls EQL Directory.
4
The initiatives are important for economic reasons
alone, as audio professionals make an enormous contribution to our UK
Creative Industries; in 2016 the creative industries contributed £27 billion
value of service exports (11% of total UK services exports), and in 2018 an
overall value of £101.5 billion.
5
Although projects that improve diversity
in audio are key to the industry’s transformation, this chapter looks more
closely at qualitative data, personal experiences, and narratives that help
us understand the issues women face – experiences that otherwise abstract
data about gender, and provide a path to understanding how personal and
systemic sexism may be contributing to a situation where women leave
audio engineering professions, as articulated briefly by Beth O’Leary and
Kim Watson in The Guardian (2019).
Other sources of such insight include the personal narratives of gender-
based violence and discrimination faced by women, including Tarana
Burke’s “Me Too” movement and Alyssa Milano’s subsequent #metoo. But
also a growing body of scholarship including Tara Rogers’ Pink Noises:
Women on Electronic Music and Sound offer a substantial portfolio of
qualitative materials that include nuanced discussion around the impact of
268
269 Conversations in Berlin
sexual violence, sexism, and prejudice in music (Bannister, 2017; Fuller,
2016; Gavanas & Reitsamer, 2013; Hill, 2016; Hill & Savigny, 2019;
Leonard, 2017; Rodgers, 2010; Théberge, 1997; Thornton, 1996; Walser,
1993; Wolfe, 2019 to cite a few). Paula Wolfe’s Women in the Studio: Cre-
ativity, Control and Gender in Popular Music Production (Wolfe, 2019)
offers a significantly deeper dive into this topic, drawing on her analysis of
93 (conference/industry) speakers, six informal conversations, 31 formal
primary and 10 secondary interviews. Wolfe is also careful to emphasize
that gender-based prejudice is not so simply attributed to individual peo-
ple, but that it is a consequence of “the historically marginalised status of
women practitioners, combined with the gendering of the field that has . . .
resulted in gendered assumptions about the profession” (Wolfe, 2019, loc
2218). Concerned with Electronic Dance Music culture more specifically,
Gavanas and Reitsamer draw on 75 face-to-face interviews with DJs in
London, Stockholm and Vienna, and suggest that the informality of this
scene is a factor:
We argue that this scarcity of women artists originates partly in the
gendered social construction of technology and partly in the informal
character of working environments and social networks in electronic
dance music cultures, dominated by images of male artists/musicians/
producer/entrepreneur and the sexualised images of (young) women.
(Gavanas & Reitsamer, 2013: 54)
Grace Banks’ article in The Quietus refers to an “unconscious bias [that]
plays out under the radar” (Banks, 2017); providing a range of examples,
she explains that “[t]hey had an insult for anyone who fucked up: ‘girl’. It
was banter, of course, but, it made me feel bad each time I heard it”. She
cites examples of objectification, and the underestimation of her technical
agency, explaining that “[e]nvironmental factors [such as images of male
musicians and a naked women] leading to such feelings can be unquantifi-
able and subliminal but they are, nevertheless, there” (Ibid.). These contri-
butions bring us closer to exploring a pervasive undercurrent of misogyny,
and perhaps often the subtle but damaging unconscious bias still faced by
women in audio. The most powerful stories of sexism, racism, homophobia,
and ableism have necessary impact, but they often receive more attention
than the subtle everyday actions – that might appear to be relatively harm-
less when viewed in isolation, while eroding self-belief, self-confidence,
and resilience, doing slow permanent damage, like water lapping a coastal
cliff until even the strongest foundations have crumbled and dissolved into
the sea.
I am personally concerned with access points: once we have inspired
girls and young women to pursue an interest in audio, the spaces where
they can explore this interest. As a much younger woman interested in
music technology, I was dissuaded by male targeted music tech adverts
(featuring men in studios, and female models used to sell magazines
and equipment): “these publications routinely associate electronic music
machines with seductive, female sexuality” (Sterne & Rodgers, 2011: 37)
270 Liz Dobson
(see this Flickr album
6
). I wondered how I could fit in, and now I wonder
how this and these spaces are perceived by the next generation.
Following my 16th university induction week welcoming a predominantly
male undergraduate cohort, I visited Berlin to interview womxn music pro-
ducers. I conducted 18 interviews, asking about these producers’ creative
practice, how they came to use technology, and if or when they have become
conscious about their gender when working in this field. Those interviews
provided a springboard for exploring further insights, particularly on activ-
ism, inclusion, and diversity. However, at that time my selection process
for participants lacked attention to diversity amongst women around race,
socio-economic background, sexuality, and disability. This is one significant
shortcoming of the work, as the narrative represents the experiences of some,
but not all women, because I did not prioritize this due to my own blindness
and lack of preparation, or understanding about intersectional feminism.
ARTISTS INTERVIEWED
Artist A
Composer, producer and electro-pop artist, their work spans from glitchy,
abstract, multichannel electroacoustic experimental pieces, live electronics
and audio-reactive visuals to the electro basslines and synth pop melodies
of the solo project ‘Strip Down’. They studied composition at Birmingham
Conservatoire and the “Hanns Eisler” Hochschule Für Musik in Berlin.
Kaltès
Musician, DJ, curator with a background in jazz and improvisation, and an
active member of female:pressure, she released music on prominent labels
such as Eotrax and MORD.
7
Sol Rezza
She is a sound artist, radio producer, and sound designer for media and an
electroacoustic music composer.
8
Miruna (Boru) Borusiade
A DJ with a classical music education, whose “DJ sets combine bold and
obscure sounds and genres fluctuating mostly in the field of Dark Disco,
EBM, tropical mutants with an Acid touch”.
9
Flora Könemann
Works at the interface of experimental music, sound, and performance:
10
Currently, she has a keen interest in combining sound performance,
dance/choreography and shamanism. In her sound performances she
271 Conversations in Berlin
uses everyday materials and “broken” and/or sorted out instruments/
objects. Often these are objects and instruments that are “found” and
recorded locally. For example, she was invited to a sound performance
on the Canadian clothesline and let the listeners look at a shopping
street, while in the background they sewed a loudspeaker noisily using
a yarn and needle.
11
Adrienne Teicher
Sound designer, composer, and movement artist known for collaborative
work HYENAZ
12
with Fischer:
The techno soundscapes, performative installations and a/v works
they produce are based on the sonic shapeshifting of eld recordings
gathered everywhere from refugee camps to amphibian habitats to in-
tentional communities. These works ask the question: What happens
when the body becomes a foreign object, an unknown territory even to
itself, a thing to be feared, managed even annihilated?
13
Katheryn Fischer
Electronic music producer and
creator of multimedia and immersive live performances polypartner
Teicher for our project HYENAZ. We are scavengers, shapeshifters
and androgynous creatures whose soundscapes spring from the sur-
plus and detritus of our cultural and consumerist material. We are de-
termined to create the fabric of our music entirely from found sounds
that relate closely to the conceptual content of the song, so that pro-
cess relates to product. We are learning and conversing with the world
around us, a world that is increasingly harder to survive in without
amassing money.
14
I conducted a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) of the interview
transcripts, seven of which feature directly in this chapter.
15
The salient
themes are presented with further annotations that connect them with rel-
evant cultural literatures, musicology, sociology, and education research.
‘THE PREROGATIVE OF BOYS’
These interviews presented many stories of bias around technical compe-
tence and gender. These first examples illustrate perceptions of how this
sub-cultural capital in audio is still “depicted in gender-free or masculine
terms and remains the prerogative of boys” (Thornton, 1996,: 163):
in my everyday life and my profession, it’s extremely obvious that
every time I have a technical problem, I’m a woman having a techni-
cal problem. Whatever I do. I don’t even think I can reach a point of
272 Liz Dobson
knowledge so extreme that I will stop being judged as a woman hav-
ing a technical problem.
Kaltès
there’s always that feeling of being outnumbered and having to not
make mistakes, be better than other people when you need to be.
Könemann
I mean it often happens that there’s some kind of say gender comment,
or they don’t take you so serious, and to be really like a – in some ways
you’re confronted with this issue even if you don’t ask for it. In that
way it always – it’s the gender issue it always comes up.
Könemann
Interviewer: Can you give me any examples of more specic situa-
tions? You don’t have to name anybody, it’s just to help somebody who
doesn’t understand what you mean by these encounters that you expe-
rience. Könemann: Yes, I mean it’s also like in this situation like, for
example, you come to a concert and then what happened to me is that
the technician doesn’t really recognise you. You say what you need.
Like all the time I always have my own mixer so what I only need is – so
I modulate the sound myself. . . . Sometimes they don’t like it because
it’s their job . . . once I was playing with a friend and the technician he
was sticking to him, just talking to him, and he was like I’ve no idea
about the techniques I only play the guitar, you have to ask [Köne-
mann] because she’s the one who is doing the more [electroacoustic] –
electronic things. He said it three times and this guy still didn’t look at
me. So this kind of thing is like – I mean it’s really annoying.
Könemann
Teicher works and performs with Fischer.
If a sound engineer that we’re working with understands me as a man,
then, often, they will just talk to me about various aspects – dierent
aspects of our performance. I nd that annoying, to be begin with. We
then actively make [Fischer] more of a contact person when we enter
a club for technical aspects, so that it’s – just to break that whole thing
a little bit.
Teicher
So many of these interviews showed how women working in audio are
assumed not to have knowledge about audio: “Because women are not
expected to have certain abilities, there is always an element of doubt,
even if it is temporary, concerning their capacity to do the job well”
(Puwar, 2004: 91). These interviews mirror many extensive studies that
show how women in audio are underestimated but simultaneously held
to higher expectations, required to work harder in order to be taken seri-
ously, while also often experiencing sexual intimidation and teasing in
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