The document provides an analysis of how voices are used and represented in digital media and how this relates to conceptions of the body. It discusses how: 1) Female voices are often used for automated announcements and personal assistants, representing a "soft coercion" that masks social control. 2) Technologies aim to make voices seem disembodied and fluid rather than tied to physical bodies. Artists explore new forms of embodiment through manipulated voices. 3) The process of granular synthesis can create extended or impossible voices that signify divided and networked bodies in the same way organic voices signify physical bodies.

1. 1
Castles in the Sky:
Clouds, Voices & the
Aural Dispersal of the
Body Post Internet
Final Research Essay 2
Nik Rawlings
Tutor: Dr. Kersten Glandien
Submitted Monday 9th February 2015

2. I’d like to think
of my body as
a cloud
I have enough lack
of muscle definition to be
considered that way
Or as codecs
degrading grains of an original
while unifying them
by rough similarity
2

3. Contents
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………………...4
SOFT COERCION: THE SOOTHING FEMALE VOICE OF CONTROL……………………………………....6
DYNAMIC BODIES, IMAGINED NETWORKS: THE BODY OF THE POST-INTERNET…………………….10
GRANULAR SYNTHESIS, DISPERSAL, AND THE CLOUD……………………………………………...15
SWARMS: THE GRANULAR NETWORK-VOICE OF HOLLY HERNDON…………………………………19
AURAL PROSTHESIS, SONIC CONCEALER: THE PERFECTED BODY OF HANNAH DIAMOND…………… 24
THE NEW (GRANULAR) AESTHETIC……………………………………………………………… 27
CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………29
BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………………30
LIST OF WORKS…………………………………………...……………………………………34
3

4. In the developed world, our every move is inscribed into data, networked, archived. The
collapse of distance between the internet and our communications, trade, relationships and
bodies has begun to dramatically change conceptions of subjectivity and of embodiment.
Through greater integration of technology, the cultural imagination of the form of technology
begins to affect the form of the subject and the body.
As a key signifier of the body, musicians and artists use the voice to explore this process of
integration and transformation, and explore new and developing forms of embodiment. This
essay considers the context of, and processes behind practices that create extended,
impossible or hyper-real voices.
The first chapter, considers the way that the female voice is employed in public space to
signify central power in what is referred to as soft coercion. Here, the female voice is seen to
provide a respectable, motherly façade to coercive power, that represents the ideal of late-
capital, if not the bodies it benefits. This reading of public space as upheld by the
technologized voice leads to a dissection of similar voices in personal devices, and the role
that these voices play in encouraging the regular divulging of personal data.
The second chapter examines, of the corporate concealment of the material realities of the
internet and computation, behind representations of these technologies as amorphous and
fluid forms. Subsequently, a discussion of how these representations effect the cultural
imaginations of technologies, and in so doing, shape our relationships with them.
The next chapter examines the history and development of works using Granular Synthesis,
with particular scrutiny being given to the materiality that has previously been ascribed to
this process. A development of this investigation will posit Granular Synthesis as functioning
itself as a network technology. Then, through case studies of two artists using granular
processes, Holly Herndon and Hannah Diamond, it is argued that this aural network
functions both as a structural metaphor for the internet, but also as facilitating the
production of manipulated, extended and impossible voices which (in the same way that an
organic voice signifies the physical body) signify the augmented, divided, hyper-real of the
networked body.
Following on from the establishment of these comparisons, the concluding chapter argues for
a deeper understanding of the forms and metaphors involved in the processes that sound
4

5. practitioners employ for sound-making, against a background of growing technological
illiteracy and the political problems that this creates.
5

6. Soft Coercion: The Soothing Female Voice of Control
When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a
proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of secondhand truth, objectivity and
authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the
figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic stricken
production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production.
This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us; a strategy of the real, neo-real and
hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.1
-Jean Baudrillard
In Simulacra and Simulations, Jean Baudrillard considers the construction of the ‘hyperreal’ by
late capitalist society, arguing that the ‘real’ has been replaced by simulations of a real, and
by simulacra, signs and forms which may have had no reality in the first place. As
Baudrillard writes, in a society where simulated realities have entirely enveloped those
which may be considered ‘authentic,’ a form of nostalgia for authenticity, bodily reality and
objectivity become prevalent.2
The voice is considered to be an authentic and reliable document of the self, body and
identity by legal, political and journalistic institutions. Consider for example, the use of
linguistic analysis by immigration officials to determine the true origin of refugees who are
attempting to claim asylum but are without identification papers.3, 4 Here, the grain and
accent of a voice is considered to hold more truth than the words spoken.
6
1 J. Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, Selected Writings, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1988 pp.
166-184
2 I.bid.
3 D. Eades ‘Applied Linguistics and Language Analysis in Asylum Seeker Cases’, Applied Linguistics,
vol.26, no. 4, 2005 pp. 503-526
4 “…mass migrations that became the catalyst for immigration authorities around the world to turn to
forensic speech analysis to determine which individuals had been displaces as a result of the catastrophic
invasions [of the Afghan and Iraq wars] and which were simply migrants posing as refugees…In these
circumstances, the interview process between the immigration authorities and the asylum seeker is
recorded, and the claimants voice is then analysed by phoneticians…these in turn contract regional
phoneticians to assess whether the voice and accent correlate with the claim of national origin.”
-L. Abu Hamdan, ‘The Freedom of Speech Itself’, Cabinet, vol. 43, 2011, pp. 81-85.

7. Mladen Dolar writes that the voice is the outward signifier of the body, an auditory
externalization of the internal, but that this relation becomes troublesome in acousmatic
situations as is typically the case with the technologized and mediated voice:
The voice appears as the link which ties the signifier to the body. It indicates that the
signifier, however purely logical and differential, must have a point of origin and
emission in the body (…) There is no voice without a body, but yet again this relation
is full of pitfalls: it seems that the voice pertains to the wrong body, or doesn’t fit the
body at all, or disjoints the body from which it emanates. 5
The voice can therefore be seen as proof of a body, yet this relation becomes complicated by
the emergence of technologies that remove the body from the voice (the voice mediated by
technology is almost always an acousmatic voice, without a visible source-body), or that
create networks, archives and databases out of it, or appropriate it for new ends.
In one example of this repurposing of the voice away from the body, Nina Power examines
the relationship of the female-sounding voice to what she refers to as the ‘soft coercion’ of the
instructive voice in public spaces. The female-sounding voice, reconstructed from
fragmentary prerecorded phrases and archived into computer systems has, she says, become
that of automated announcement systems, and of:
The sound of a quiet catastroph[e], of social control as such, rather than just the
ordinary running of things. This particular construction of gender - albeit of a
disembodied, ghostly kind - would make the recorded female voice a kind of cover-
story for a normalcy that is in fact a state of emergency, of crisis, of barbarism and
capitalism.6
Power here calls into question the role of the female-sounding voice in glossing over the
‘barbarism’ of everyday control structures. Why is it that the voice telling us, for example,
that the train we wish to take home after work is that of a woman? Power asks; would a male
voice sound too ‘serious’, too clearly authoritarian?7
7
5 M. Dolar. A Voice and Nothing More. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2006 pp. 59-60.
6 N. Power,. ‘Soft Coercion, The City and the Recorded Female Voice’, in The Acoustic City, M. Gandy &
B.J. Nilsen,(eds.), Jovis, Berlin. 2014 pp. 23-26 .
7 Ibid. p. 25.

8. She argues that the female voice is in fact part of a ‘re-gendering and re-coding of control’8, it
has been co-opted as the ideologically symbolic (she posits that these voices are mostly the
clipped, brusque voices of upper middle class women; read as conservative, sensible,
privileged and bureaucratic, like a Mary Poppins character ordering us through the city), yet
not representative (for power is still mainly in the hands of men) voice of control, of capital;
the voice of soft coercion, telling us to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ through the catastrophic
melee of late capitalism.9
Power also refers to the voice of Siri, the voice-activated personal assistant on Apple iOS
devices. Siri, according to Power, by default responds with a female voice, with the
implication that;
… Her (default) female voice fits into a continuum of secretaries and personal assistants
[in a way that] is clear (if you ask Siri who ‘she’ is she will respond ‘I am your humble
personal assistant’).10
However, it is the aim of the device to be forgotten; to be integrated ever more seamlessly
into the everyday and into our bodies. As Graham Harman has written, tools are most ‘tool-
like’ when they are hardly noticeable at all, silently performing their function without any
disruption.11
The operation of the female voice in the case of technologies such as Siri, along with the
development of simplified interfaces and an image-based rather than text-based internet is to
coerce more spontaneous and organic usage of a device, blend seamlessly into the
background; and in doing so, to glean more and more personal data (and use value) from us.
As Elvia Wilk writes;
Forgetting the device makes it possible to forget that your online identity does not
directly correlate with your physical one. Sure, you still ‘create’ or curate yourself online,
8
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 G. Harman,. Towards speculative realism. Zero Books, Winchester, 2010 p. 83

9. but now that the internet is a visual arena with real time access, your identity is no longer
as amorphous or abstracted from reality as it once was. 12
In the wake of the revelations of the documents released by Edward Snowden, the
confirmation of the worst fears of internet surveillance have been confirmed; that we are all
indiscriminately being watched by governmental agencies - and that corporate business and
social media allow the back-doors to be built for this.13 It is therefore possible to view the
attempt by the device, by social media and other network and communication technologies,
to be fully integrated into the everyday and into our bodies, as inherent to the programs of
data collection and surveillance that have developed.
Artist Harry Sanderson’s show Unified Fabric at the South London gallery ‘Arcadia_missa’14,
saw Sanderson present a render-farm; a group of networked computers, pooling resources to
continuously render videos through complex graphic processes. This was an attempt to
expose the geographies and physicalities of networks (they rely on vast computing power,
that is situated somewhere, rather than actually being immaterial, and rely on exploitative
labour for their production and maintenance). Mike Runyan, responding to the show, writes;
What we secrete is data. What the corporate, unified image secretes is the ideology of the
robber barons of data, who have gained bulk possession of our collective experience
through their capacity to build infrastructure. This capacity to build has always been the
foundation of power-syphoned via ownership.15
In the case of technologies such as Siri therefore, the female voice functions as another form
of soft coercion, streamlining the usage of devices that transcribe our communications, actions
and bodies into accessible data. Siri is here the unthreatening, soothing assistant-voice
disguising the true intent of those ‘robber barons of data.'
9
12 E. Wilkes, ‘Where looks don’t matter and only the best writers get laid: Subjectivity and other
unfulfilled promises of the text-based Internet’, in (networked) Every Whisper Is A Crash On My Ears,
Arcadia_Missa (eds.), Arcadia_Missa, London, 2014 p.42
13 ‘Jacob Applebaum: To Protect And Infect Part 2’, Online Video, 2014, accessed 22 October 2014,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vILAlhwUgIU
14 H. Sanderson, Unified Fabric, London, Arcadia_Missa 2013
15 M. Runyan, ‘Life In the Data Center Doesn’t Stop…When You Live Your Life’ in (networked) Every
Whisper Is A Crash On My Ears, Arcadia_Missa (eds.), Arcadia_Missa, London, 2014 p.169

10. Dynamic Bodies, Imagined Networks: The Body of the Post-Net
“Be water, my friend”
-Bruce Lee
The way that we culturally imagine the internet and computing, as with all technologies,
forms the way that we relate to them. Harry Sanderson’s efforts to foreground the material
and exploitative realities of the internet and of computing also unfold attempts to maintain
representations of these technologies as ‘immaterial,' mutable and dynamic that function to
create what he refers to as a “necessary insouciance towards the exploitation and violence
required for their continuing production.”16
In his essay Human Resolution, Sanderson posits that Cartesian dualism (the disjunction from,
and privileging of mind over body), via the “making of the enlightenment man”(ref), paved
the way for a privileging of the production of the intellect whilst denying “personhood to the
body of those converted into objects [ie., viewed only as labour resources] in the name of
profit”17:
The computer and the network, emerging from this philosophical locus, can
be seen as concatenations of violent power structures borne by the amputation
of the intellect from the body, and obscured by digital form.18 (ref)
To maintain these economies of exploitation, Sanderson argues that representations of the
internet and computation employ ameliorative imagery and nomenclature that are fluid,
weightless and mutable. These obscure the oppression of bodies that “died to improve the
sharpness of a film19” or that are “curtailed and enclose[d] […] in both the physical world
and the virtual”20 behind a smokescreen of images that are an expression (and also a
demonstration) of these technologies. These fabrications can be considered to fulfill what
10
16 H. Sanderson, ‘Human Resolution’, Mute, accessed 2 January 2015, http://www.metamute.org/
editorial/articles/human-resolution
17 ibid., p. 3.
18 ibid.
19 ibid., p. 1.
20 ibid., p. 9

11. Baudrillard refers to as the “panic stricken production of the real and the referential”21, a
construction of a hyper-reality that operates above and separate to the material realities of
production.
Cloud, Stream, Swarm - the names by which we refer to quotidian technologies further a
representation of them as immaterial, weightless, flowing. As an advert that Sanderson refers
to, for Cisco Systems’ cloud computing services states, alongside amorphous digitally
rendered membranes: “You can’t touch it, you can’t see it, but you feel its power.”22 These
weightless and reified conceptions of the network and computing fabricate cultural
imaginations of them as exactly that.
Sanderson notes that these conceptions of fluidity have been achieved through an ecological
reading of technology and capital, achieved by the insertion of devices into the everyday and
into the body.23 As we have already seen, technologies and devices already not only form
coercive power structures, but do so by subsuming the body, via voice, into its interface. He
writes that the integration and equation of the body with the machine in their
representations, posits the machine, and therefore the exploitative architectures and
(dualistic) hierarchies of globalised capital which produce it, as expressing a natural, organic
and undeniably right way of things:
After the equation of body with machine comes the equation of the machine
in symbiosis with, and as an expression of the inalienable rightness of Nature.
To understand how this occurs, we must appreciate the unity of word and image
in forging connections which flatten and obscure domination by equating it
with self-­organising ‘flows’ and ‘energies’, attempting, through obfuscation and
metaphor, to suggest that these relations are something other than ‘the triumph
of invested capital, whose title as absolute master is etched deep onto the
hearts of the dispossessed on the employment line’24
Here, fluidity functions as a metaphor for nature itself, which in turn ‘flattens and obscures
domination’ and creates a hyper-real facade that distances the consumer from the material
and exploitative realities of the network, devices and computing.
11
21 Baudrillard, op. cit., p. 166.
22 ‘Cisco Unified Fabric: For a Better Life’, Online Video, 2011, accessed 27 December 2014, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKiXyyZ21nk
23 Sanderson, op.cit., p. 6.
24 ibid.

12. If computational and networking power are then, articulated in corporate image culture as
clouds, streams, fabrics or liquid to obscure the realities of their production, how have these
forms affected cultural imaginations and interpretations of technology at the consumer, public
and social level?
If one considers fluids for a moment; what material qualities come to mind? One may float,
swim, dive or drown within them, be enveloped or showered by them. Here, the description
of the defunct internet aesthetic, ‘Seapunk,' and its tropish use of graphically rendered
oceans and marine fauna by artist Zombelle seem pertinent:
Seapunk, if you wanna be really basic, if you replace the S-E-A with C, like
cyberpunk – like the Internet and the vast sea of information that you can find on
the Internet – if you look at it that way, and then you look at the aesthetic, it kind
of makes a little more sense. I definitely have a fascination with the ocean, and I
have a lot of different feelings for large bodies of water, including fear and
including apocalyptic vibes of fear that some day the ocean’s gonna swallow us,
and what are we gonna do about that, like, it’s gonna be a water world reality. So
it’s all of those things combined together, and that’s why the style is more of a
future vibe.25
Here, Zombelle relates the content stored online as forming a ‘sea of information,' a sea that
she fears may consume us until we too are its fauna. A fear of drowning within a maelstrom
of information and communications is ironically a frequent concern of TED-talks, clickbait
sites, or online op-ed writing; there are many scaremongering articles decrying our voyage to
the bottom of this particular sea.26
A very similar rendered body of water greets the browser at calm.com, an online relaxation
service.27 Its users may select guided meditations of varying lengths, with ambient ‘spa’
12
25 N. Harwood, ‘You Never Thought Seapunk Would Take It This Far’, Respect Magazine, 2012,
accessed 4 January 2015, http://respect-mag.com/you-never-thought-seapunk-would-take-it-this-
far-zombelle-talks-azealia-banks-rihanna-the-week-the-second-internet-exploded/
26 ‘A year offline, what I have learned: Paul Miller at TEDxEutropolis’, Online Video, 2013, accessed 22
January 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trVzyG4zFMU
27 Calm.com, Website, accessed 8 February 2015, https://www.calm.com/

13. music and a female voice-over (another form of soft coercion: ‘let your focus come to your
breath’) accompanying alternately; a backdrop of a calm ocean under yellow sunsets or a sea
in which we are immersed and looking toward the surface, clouds through which we fly or
watch swirl about with sunlight breaking through, or rivers flowing over rocks.
‘Virtual’ meditation, hyper-dieting and health technologies are also prevalent forms that are
frequently occupied and appropriated by Post-Internet artists, and constitute much of the
sound work that has been produced by associated artists and musicians, playing on the
coercive HD-kitsch of automaton workout instructors and yogis.
These forms can be understood as symptomatic of networked late capital, where a ‘fear of
missing out’ and incessant demand of prosumer economies makes sleep an undesirable
waste of potentially ‘productive’ time28, a blockage in the efficient flows of the hyper-real.
Soft coercion on the personal scale - for your wellbeing.
However, Gene McHugh, whose blog ‘Post-Internet’ was an early proponent of the term,
offers a slightly more pragmatic view.29 He posits that the ‘digital native’ generation, for
whom the internet has always been part of their social development, do not consider the
‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ as necessarily exclusive realms.30 For McHugh, online and offline are
no longer mutually exclusive, but rather constitute a new, mixed reality, where online
existence requires new and more adaptable performances of the self, to negotiate the
complex range of social contexts it encompasses.31 This view of the internet as a banal fact of
everyday life, that has expanded and circumscribed social and political reality is key to the
notion of a Post-Internet.
McHugh also describes a ‘push and pull’ of online and offline scenarios which together
forms the users’ reality,32 which resonates with the processes of ‘becoming fluid’ that
13
28 J. Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Verso, London, 2013, p.10.
29 G. McHugh, ‘The Context of the Digital: A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships’, in You Are Here -
Art After The Internet, O. Kholeif, Cornerhouse, London, 2014, pp. 28-34
30 ibid., p. 31.
31 Worth mentioning here too, is that the decentralisation of labour in Late Capitalism requires its
subjects to constantly negotiate these myriad scenarios in search of work, collaboration and
commonality.
32 ibid., p.29.

14. Branden Hookway argues is a key factor in all interfaces; especially within the interface’s
matrix of power, agency and subjectification:33
Fluidity provides a powerful metaphor for the operation of the interface, as well as for
associated processes of mediation and control. To engage an interface is also to become a
constituent element within a kind of fluidity. Likewise, subjectification may be described
as a process of becoming fluid34 […] the interface is both an interiority confined by its
bounding entities and a means of accessing, confronting or projecting into an exteriority.
It is defined by its bounding entities at the same time that it defines them.35
Hookway’s investigation into the interface also finds that the word originated from the study
of fluid dynamics in the nineteenth century, coined by James Thomson to:
Denote a dynamic boundary condition describing fluidity according to its
separation of one distinct fluid body from another. The interface would define
and separate areas of unequal energy distribution within a fluid in motion,
whether this difference is given in terms of velocity, viscosity, directionality of
flow, kinetic form, pressure, density, temperature, or any combination of these.
From difference the interface would produce fluidity.36
The interface of fluid dynamics is an amorphous zone of contestation, meetings and
differences, while the technological interface is a similarly fluid form.
If we enter into a state of (subjective) fluidity when dealing with interfaces, while
contemporary life involves constant negotiations at the borders (interface) of the on- and
offline realms; then not only could fluidity be considered a ‘powerful metaphor’ within our
conception of network technologies, but also for the form of highly networked selfhood in
which subjectivity becomes performance, and subjectification is a central tool of control.
In this context of integrated online and offline experiences and, co-opted (female) voices and
fluid bodies, it is perhaps no surprise that so many vocalists - especially those whose bodies
are called into question by the coercive pressures of networked late-capitalism - choose to
14
33 B. Hookway, Interface, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2014.
34 ibid., p. 5.
35 ibid., p., 9.
36 ibid., p. 59.

15. modify, augment, network, perfect or multiply their voices; by extension also performing all
of these processes upon their bodies.
The following chapters will consider how vocalists, in particular those using techniques
based upon Granular Synthesis, manipulate their voices in ways that form both aural and
processual metaphors for the networked self-hoods, and in doing so, create aural cultures
which confront the issues of agency, representation, performance and control discussed
above. An argument will be made that this division of original bodies of sound, their
dispersion and recombination into new and mutable sound-bodies can be read as
functioning as a process of becoming fluid, performing the molten body of the Post-Internet.
Granular Synthesis, dispersal, and the cloud
Microsound, an experimental music scene that flourished mainly between the early 1990s to
early 2000s37, dealt in the ‘small sounds’ of Granular Synthesis and glitches. Microsound’s
central writer, Curtis Roads, posits that rather than only existing as waves, sound also exists
as particles in different time scales, from the very long to the ‘infinitesimally’ short.38
Granular Synthesis functions by creating multitudes of ‘grains’ of sound, which theoretically
can exist in all and any of the time scales described by Roads, but which in practice, are
generally defined as less than 100 milliseconds long. These grains can either be entirely
synthesized or, as in the works that this paper is primarily concerned with, made by dividing
(granulating) an original audio recording or live stream of sound, and then using these
grains to create entirely new sounds that can bear little to no resemblance to the original
sound itself (resynthesis). Grains can be given a volume envelope, and analyzed for
harmonic and timbral traits, and selected and organised from these differing characteristics
for playback and manipulation.39
15
37 The Microsound scene of the mid 1990s onwards was more generally an independent scene as
opposed to the Institutional settings in which much Granular work had previously been made. The
context of increased computational power available at consumer level and it’s relation to the
development of this scene at this time, hardly bears repeating, but is important not only to the
availability of tools for such work but also, as we’ll see, to the discourses that informed the material
concerns that microsonic works addressed.
38 C. Roads, Microsound, 1st ed. MIT Press Cambridge, Mass., 2001 p.3.
39 ibid., p. 235.

16. From the very earliest granular works, such as Iannis Xenakis’ Concrete PH40,41, grains of
sound have been used to create ‘zones of intensity,' networks, or ‘clouds’. These approaches
were a development on the earlier ‘sound mass’ or cluster found within the works of György
Ligeti or Henry Cowell.
Clouds or zones of grains form coherent and dynamic ‘meso-temporal’ sound architectures
within a composition, or more simply, they combine multitudes of grains into cohesive yet
changing sounds.42 These amorphous forms, and the collaborations between grains to create
unified bodies of sound from particulate individuals, have been conceptualized in myriad
different ways.
For example, Xenakis proposed that granular spectromorphology (the way that the aural
qualities of grains change over time) could be considered as a series of screens stacked
temporally, upon which grains became pixels whose qualities changed over time. For
Xenakis, granular composition therefore opened up new possibilities for spectral
composition, with frequency and intensity as X and Y axes, and duration as a Z axis43. This
conception of granular composition as three dimensional has made modeling a prevalent
concern of its practitioners.
As Phivos Kollias has proposed, Xenakis’ conception of granular spectromorphology can be
read as essentially cybernetic44, forming an organisational system based primarily upon
grains’ qualities of difference (of timbre, frequency and volume) and transformation (through
time).45 However, readings of Granular Synthesis developed further in the emergence of the
1990s’ ‘Independent’ Microsound scene, that lean towards an aesthetic understanding of
grains as constituting models of atomic, cellular or ecological processes; thereby imagining
16
40 I. Xenakis. Concrete PH, 1958
41 Roads, op. cit., p. 64
42 Roads, pp. 14-16
43 P. A. Kollias, ‘Iannis Xenakis and Systems Thinking’, Phivos-Angelos Kollias, accessed 22 January
2015, http://phivos-angelos-kollias.com/papers/2011-Xenakis_Conference.pdf
44 ibid., p. 2.
45 ibid.

17. granular compositions as inherently organic or material while also narrative.46 Curtis Roads
describes granular composition as:
…About telling a story: The sounds are born, they live, they change, they meet other
sounds, they collide; one sound destroys another, they merge together, they get married,
they get divorced, become unstable, change identity, mutate and die.47
Within granular composition, this re-imagining of sound into material, the likening of the
resulting ‘grains’ to atoms, and composition of works that sounded somehow like a narrative,
cellular process, were aligned with a cultural attempt to re-imagine data as matter in the
1990s and was often organised around discussion and debate the Microsound48 email forum.
Indeed, around the same time as Independent Microsound came to the fore, there was much
discourse concerning the likening of binary code to genetic code, following the rise of the
virtual, which was seen to be materially and politically detached from ‘the real.’ As Cadence
Kinsey writes:
This precipitated a crisis in theories of human-machine interaction (…) which saw
numerous theorists attempting to map a supposedly disembodied interaction with this
abstract plane of representation of code. Such ideas further intersected with the then
emergent knowledge of genetics, resulting in a perceived equivalence between binary
and genetic code that aggravated the critical discourse to the point where the human
subject was also considered to be in crisis.49
Such equations of data or code as analogous to nature clearly had traction in the aesthetics of
atomic, particulate or cellular granular compositions, in which grains, or clouds of grains, are
programmed to interact in ways that are modeled after organic, ecological or chemical
processes. As has already been argued earlier in this paper, the likening of technologies to
nature is integral both to the corporate representation of computing and networks, and also
as a result, to the cultural imagination of those technologies. Therefore, the engagement of
17
46 J. Demers, ‘Minimal Objects in Microsound’, in Listening Through The Noise, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 2010, pp. 69-90
47 ‘Curtis Roads: Getting Granular’, Online Video, 2014, accessed 22 November 2014, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=buoTb83cxjM
48 Microsound, Website, accessed 29 January 2015 http://microsound.org/
49 C. Kinsey, ‘From Post-Media to Post-Medium: Rethinking Ontology in Art and Technology’, in
Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology, C. Apprich, J.B. Slater & O.L. Schultz (eds.), Mute, London,
2013 p. 69

18. Microsonic works with a process of modeling organic forms and systems can be read as a
response to these concerns.
It is important to add here that a key aesthetic concern of much Microsonic work is to
perform these material processes in a reified atmosphere away from any obvious aural
signifier or referent; Joanna Demers has noted that Microsound has been criticized for its
refusal to explicitly engage with politics due this lack of aural referents.50 However, she
counters that this refusal may in fact constitute an ideological attempt to produce music that
signifies in and of itself, without relying on discursive or textual interpretation. She writes
that: “Once music relies on spoken or written language, it becomes subject to interpretation
and misinterpretation […] Microsound might thus represent less an effort to avoid
signification altogether than an idealistic attempt to preserve music’s ability to signify.”51
In a similar fashion, Mitchell Whitelaw’s paper, Sound Particles and Microsonic Materialism,
argues that the positing of sound-as-material in Microsound risks misrepresenting its own
compositional meaning;
…in performing [a] rhetorical merger between matter and data, microsonic audio is
misrepresenting the real and important relationship between those two terms which is
at its core. What marks this audio culture out is its exploration of the very rich and
immediate interface between the informational domain of digital signal processing
and the material domains of acoustic sound, listening, embodied experience, physical
presence and awareness. Whatever bit-friction may be occurring inside the computer
is only meaningful as it radiates out into real space. Microsonic data materialises as it
reaches the speaker-cone, becoming sound.52
So, for Whitelaw, the materiality of the sound-particle can only exist aurally, and therefore,
its representation as a metaphorical, material signifier of digital data is confused, since for
him data cannot be considered material; he argues that: “a bit is not an atom”53, and also that:
“the sound particle is a figurative distraction from what’s most interesting here: the circuits
and interfaces of data systems with sound, embodied experience, and culture.”54
18
50 Demers, op. cit., p. 88
51 ibid., p. 89
52 Whitelaw, M. (2003). Sound particles and microsonic materialism. Contemporary Music Review,
22(4), p.98.
53 Ibid., p.97.
54 Ibid., p.98.

19. However, Whitelaw’s reading of the materiality that prevails in Microsound, relies upon a
position in which the virtual and the real are considered to be entirely separate. As discussed
earlier, this divide has collapsed (or at least, has begun to), and notions of embodiment and
materiality have widened to include performative online presence, image-objects55 and
coercive subjectification. Within this temporal frame, Whitelaw’s claim that the sound
particle is a ‘figurative distraction’ away from issues of embodiment and data circulation
start to break down, and granular modeling processes can offer new opportunities and
useful metaphors for performing networked self-hoods and bodies.
While the works of Microsound perform a reification of sound away from referents and
signification in a way that validates Whitelaw’s argument; there is a current proliferation of
practices that use granular techniques to perform manipulations upon the voice, which as a
key signifier for the body, reconnects the granular work to the political.
Whitelaw’s concern that the culturally important interface of the body with technology is
bypassed in Microsound, is addressed in these new granular works. The collapse of distance
between the body and data means that now, the materiality of data, is that of our own flesh
and labour. These practices - as exemplified by the artists that are the subject of the following
case studies - attempt to occupy either the mutable, fluid and swarming forms of the
culturally imagined network; or by retouching and smoothing over, using aural prostheses to
fill in the blemishes of the organic voice, make visible the hyper-real of popular culture’s
representation of the body.
Swarms: The Granular Network-Voice of Holly Herndon
One of the most prevalent uses of granular and FFT processes in recent vocal practices has
been the manipulation of the voice away from its original gender, timbre or to extend it
beyond its organic abilities. As is typically the case (and similarly to the development of
Independent Microsound), the proliferation of these practices has coincided with widely
commercially available software and hardware that allows such transformations to be
achieved outside of institutional settings. Software such as Pure Data, Max/MSP and more
19
55 A. Vierkant, ‘The Image Object Post-Internet’, Rhizome, December 20th, 2010, acccessed 4 January
2015, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2010/dec/20/required-reading/

20. recently Max for Live have provided invaluable tool to easily perform complex granular
vocal processes without the need for coding or elaborate mathematical understanding.
Hardware tools such as TC Helicon’s VoiceLive pedals provide black-boxed technologies that
enable layers of harmony and pitch-manipulation to be added to vocals. Musicians such as
Planningtorock, The Knife, Gazelle Twin and Katie Gately all employ these techniques to
produce voices that are modulated beyond their female-sounding original. The manipulation
of gender in female and queer vocalists’ practices has often previously aimed to access a
male voice, and in doing so occupy the political power and authority that the male voice
represents: one of the earliest practitioners of vocal gender bending was Laurie Anderson,
who named the male persona in her work the ‘voice of authority.’56
In the work of Holly Herndon however, we find an extension and modification of these
approaches, in that although she does extend her voice into alternative genders and sonic
identities, these identities are untethered from binary gender performances and aural bodies
that are identifiably human. Through granular and spectral Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)
processes, Herndon creates multitudes of sound-objects and timbres that concomitantly can
be heard as chattering networks, stuttering cyborg voices and breaths, or impossibly multi-
sexed bodies.
In her composition ‘Breathe’57, a track on her debut album ‘Movement,' Herndon explores an
augmentation of the breath, using spectral freezing techniques to stutter the sounds of
gasping, sucking, and exhaling air. The opening moments of the piece hear a sharp intake of
breath being shortly followed by a lower-pitched, stuttering granular shadow of this breath
that slowly fizzles out. A silence ensues inferring that the breath is being held. When this
breath is finally released with a relieved sigh, the deeper shadow coughs and shudders
again. This respiratory rise and fall is repeated continually through the work, and each
repetition spawns new layers of stuttering, resonating, croaking and swirling sound-bodies
that extend beyond the parameters of Herndon’s original voice.
These augmentations follow clearly programmed patterns and rhythmic structures, but are
slowly joined by more stochastic (random and dynamic) granular clouds and reverberations.
Eventually each intake of breath initiates its own complex systems of sound-bodies that
20
56 R Goldberg, ‘Laurie Anderson’, Thames & Hudson, London, 2000, p. 58.
57 H. Herndon, ‘Movement’, CD, RVNG intl., New York, 2012.

21. glissandi between high and low frequencies in myriad voices. Through all of this however,
Herndon’s natural voice remains at the center of focus, clearly audible. Towards the end of
the piece, there is a crescendo of activity, as multiple cloud-voices and stuttering freeze-
framed voices come together for a climactic scream, forming a dense and dissonant, yet
unified body for a moment before a sharp release, then shrinking apart into individual,
spluttering sound-bodies and slowly fading out.
The majority of these forms remain identifiable as abstractions emanating from a voice; there
is an organic quality to the stutters and swirls of each sound-object, a dampness that suggests
the mouth, the throat, saliva. This is achieved by Herndon’s careful consideration of sound
design; while granulation is used to abstract, network or freeze the voice, the sonic outcomes
of these processes retain enough of the grain of the voice, or the sibilance of the mouth, that a
body is still detectable. It has been noted that some of these sounds resemble the artifacts of
glitches in streamed media or Skype video calling58 , when the smooth flow of a digital
transmission breaks down.
What is immediately noticeable in Herndon’s work is that in comparison to the ‘minimal’59
sound-objects of Microsound, the aural bodies of Herndon are rich in signifier and referent.
Whereas the cloud forms of microsound are treated purely in terms of duration, volume and
frequency; Herndon’s insertion of the voice, a clearly identifiable and politically weighted
signifier into similarly structured compositions performs an engagement with the real, and
with exactly the issues of embodiment and data circulation that Whitelaw argued were
bypassed in Microsound. Indeed, Herndon has stated that her practice is “[an attempt to]
find a fleshiness in digital music.”60
In her postgraduate thesis entitled Embodiment in Electronic Music Performance61, Herndon
agues that the use of a voice also aids the comprehension of intent in performance:
21
58 L. Zoladz, ‘Rising: Holly Herndon’, Pitchfork, 2012, accessed 25 January 2015 http://pitchfork.com/
features/rising/8990-holly-herndon/
59 Demers, op. cit.
60 A Borkowski, ‘Song Of The Digital Flesh: Vocal Manipulation & Our Cyborg Selves’, The Quietus,
2014, accessed 2 January 2015 at: http://thequietus.com/articles/15223-vocal-manipulation-holly-
herndon-burial-katie-gately
61 H. Herndon, Embodiment in Electronic Music Performance, MA Thesis, 2010, accessed 9th January
2015, http://soundpractice.tumblr.com/post/24921349896/embodiment-in-electronic-music-
performance

22. Studies have shown that when a subject understands the intent of an action, they
are much more responsive to that action […] the fact that it is unnecessary to
observe the goal is parallel to not understanding how a certain sound manifests
from a perceived input. One may not understand the electro-mechanical
processes involved, but an empathy is established. Personally when I see a finger
moving on a laptop, I understand an intent and empathize. For illustrative
purposes, however, I prefer to look at the use of the voice as a clear physical
gesture that most people will understand. This [research] would suggest that
witnessing a voice interact with electronics, whether distorted beyond
recognition or simply rounded out by, say, a reverb effect in a concert hall, allows
the audience to understand the act of incorporation through a gesture they may
relate to their own bodies.62
Herndon’s qualification of her use of the voice as a relatable signifier with which to
communicate intent affirms the political aspect of her work; the ‘incorporation’ of the body
into the technologies she performs with.
Here, Herndon’s extension of the breath with granular and spectral FFT processes (she uses
Max/MSP to run granular patches to achieve these processes) brings the body’s interface
with technology squarely into question. If the voices of Breathe emanate from a body, they
certainly don’t emanate from an entirely human one. Rather, Breathe produces a cyborg body,
whose gasps and sighs form networks of chatters and clouds of resonances that billow
around it, independent of their origin. Herndon’s work can therefore be read as expressing a
networked body situated within the fluid and dynamic ‘boundary condition’ of the interface
described by Hookway, wherein negotiations between the body, technology and the network
extends and augments notions of embodiment and subjectivity beyond the physical and
22
62 ibid., p. 20

23. gendered bounds of that body. In creating aural networks and cloud-voices, it is arguable
Herndon performs a body that becomes-network, or becomes-cloud.63
It is important to note that by subjecting the voice to granular processing, and so becoming-
cloud, not only does Herndon create aural networks that can be heard to signify a networked
body, but she does so by subjecting the cohesive input of her voice to a process of division,
distribution and analysis. It may not be too significant a conceptual leap to argue that
Granular Synthesis creates not only aural-metaphorical networks, but also creates rhizomatic
networks of data from unified source material within its computational architectures.
Granular Synthesis itself could therefore be viewed as a network technology itself.
Interpreting Granular Synthesis in this way refocuses the practice of modeling, away from
organic simulation and toward use as a model of the fluid and mutable network itself.
Holly Herndon’s diffuse and multiple voices then, perform a modeling of the body after the
forms and architectures that computation and the internet are represented and culturally
imagined to take, and in doing so, re-inject a political, referent dimension to the lexicon of the
granular. The next case study, of pop musician Hannah Diamond’s work, will unfold the use
of granular vocal processing to construct an idealized, Baudriallardian hyper-real body that
addresses issues of affect and representation in the context of performative and networked
social reality that has been discussed earlier in this essay.
23
63 While Cybernetics, as was briefly discussed earlier in this paper, deals with transformations and
difference as organisational principals in a way that has informed previous understandings of
granular compositions in Xenakis; the argument for a performative ‘becoming network’ or
‘becoming cloud’ is influenced here by the writing of queer performance artist Paul Hurley whose
series ‘Becoming Invertebrate’ saw him perform becomings of invertebrate bodies in an attempt to:
“Replace human identity with an interspecific performativity [is] to go some way towards destabilizing the
autonomous Cartesian subject and mobilizing an ex-centric subject always in process.”
-P. Hurley, ‘On A Series of Queer Becomings: Selected Becomings-Invertebrate 2003-2005’, Rhizomes,
Issue 11/12, Fall/Winter 2006, accessed 6 February 2014, https://soundcloud.com/199uk/199-dont-
know-much

24. Aural Prosthesis, Sonic Concealer: The Perfected Body of Hannah Diamond
A feature of Post-Internet64 practices has been the response to public sharing and private
trade of personal narratives online by occupying the forms and tropes that social media
constructs, often resolving into a performative subversion or fracturing of their own online
identities, brands, and chronologies. These practices are most often concerned with textual or
image-centric production and circulation online, in which the key marker of value is it’s
share-worthiness.
Amalia Ulman is probably the most prominent Post-Internet artist to engage the online
social-image economy in this way. Her Instagram series, Excellences and Perfections65, saw her
spend three months carefully constructing a persona and posting ‘selfies’ of herself from the
position of an idealized, consumerist fantasy dream-girl. She posted selfies that purported to
show her having had breast augmentation, following a strict diet, going to pole dancing
classes. In return, she garnered a sizable online following, and was rewarded by her images
being shared about in earnest by Instagram users who believed in her façade. In doing so,
she uncovered the way that:
The power relations on social media simply mirror those at play in the world at
large. Powerful, savvy people are powerful, savvy social media users. Even while
power is leeched away from traditional mass media and the established art
world, social media too often reproduces or even amplifies the same kinds of
cultural values seen in those spheres.66
24
64 “Post-Internet Art” is a term coined by artist Marisa Olson and developed further by writer Gene McHugh in
the critical blog “Post Internet” during its activity between December 2009 and September 2010. Under
McHugh's definition it concerns “art responding to [a condition] described as 'Post Internet'-when the Internet
is less a novelty and more a banality. Perhaps ... closer to what Guthrie Lonergan described as 'Internet Aware'-
or when the photo of the art object is more widely dispersed [&] viewed than the object itself.” There are also
several references to the idea of “post-net culture” in the writings of Lev Manovich as early as 2001.
-Vierkant, op.cit.
65 A. Ulman, ‘Excellences and Perfections’, Online Artwork, 2014, last accessed 9 February 2015,
http://instagram.com/amaliaulman/
66 M. Connor, ‘First Look: Amalia Ulman-Excellences & Perfections’, Rhizome, 2014, accessed 6
February 2015 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/oct/20/first-look-amalia-ulmanexcellences-
perfections/?ref=tags_amalia-ulman_post_readbtn

25. The work of Hannah Diamond, a pop musician and artist based in London, employs similar
aesthetic devices of the privileged and superficial fantasy-girl. Her music is glistening,
astringently sweet pop, which pushes the trope of the innocent, cute pop star beyond belief.67
Released online for free, and attracting huge numbers of downloads (her song Attachment
had been played more than three hundred thousand times at the time of writing), Diamond’s
work is not only pop, but hugely popular.
Although, she does, in reality, have a high voice, Diamond’s music employs the use of the
advanced auto-tuning software Melodyne68 to smooth out and modulate her voice towards
timbres that are closer to a general MIDI saxophone than that of a voice.
Melodyne works by a process called ‘Local Sound Synthesis’ which functions by granulating
an original sound, and then inserting new synthesized grains into that original for stretching
and tuning. This kind of insertion could be read as an aural prosthesis or cosmetic
intervention; a breaking down of the voice, resolving into a new body in a polished
collaboration with the synthesized data added by the software.
Melodyne is primarily used for correcting tuning within pop music vocals, and Diamond’s
work performs a kind of obscene extension of this perfection. The software functions to make
her voice incredibly high, squeaky clean and brittle, more Vocaloid69, 70 than human. The
effect is that of a veneer breaking down, being polished right through, a voice that is so thin
it no longer obscures the digital architectures beneath it. Diamond’s voice here functions as
inverse and antithetical to that of the coercive female voice discussed in the first section of
this essay; rather than smooth over an unstable system in crisis, this voice and its failure to
be at all convincingly organic, indexes the tools of its production into each of its intonations.
Here, Diamond’s work performs an occupation, a redirection of the mode of polished popstar,
making its surface permeable, her identity too-obviously a construction. In doing so, she is
questioning the role of the (female) body, voice and identity when both can be constructed so
entirely and potentially without the agency of the performer in question. Diamond employs
25
67 H. Diamond, Pink and Blue, MP3, P.C. Music, London, 2014, Accessed 5 Jan. 2015 http://
pinkblue.pcmusic.info/
68 Melodyne, Website, las accessed 8 February 2015, http://www.celemony.com/en/start
69 Yamaha, ‘Vocaloid Singing Software’, accessed 15 November 2014, http://www.vocaloid.com/en/
70 ‘AniMiku Vocaloid Concert Live at Tora-Con’, Online Video, accessed 20 December 2014, http://
www.youtube.com/ watch?v=fB9hWyaEkGc

26. what artist Kate Cooper, who also works in the virtual rendering of female bodies, although
primarily as a visual artist, refers to as “…the language of hypercapitalism.” Cooper states
that:
“It’s very interesting just getting your hands dirty in finding your own agency within this
glossy language, to be able to produce it yourself […] When working with this technology, I
always feel there’s a kind of hacking element to it.”71
Indeed, Diamond herself states that her Pop persona is a “kind of hyper-real version of
myself”72 influenced by the aesthetics of early 2000s music videos, which she argues were
“starting to reference technology as being really sexy, but the images were also starting to
become really technical themselves.” However, as in Amalia Ulman’s practice, Diamond also
exemplifies the role of the ‘Hot Babe’ that artist Hannah Black has described: “Once, only the
professional Hot Babe adorned all major media outlets; now social media makes of everyone
a Hot Babe, should they be willing.”73
The figure of the Hot Babe unveils further the coercive game that is at play in social media; a
basic and flat performance of availability and attraction. Within the ‘like economy,' the most
successful players of this pick-up game are the Hot Babes that perform a fantasy combination
of a sexualized yet perfected innocence and purity that Ulman and Diamond both engage
with. It is arguable that in occupying the role of the Hot Babe, these artists unfold a nascent
perversity inherent to these economies.
By making permeable an idealized, hyper-real, blemish-free façade, Diamond’s work unveils
the technological apparatuses that support normative power structures in social media.
Diamond uses granular processing of her voice to perform a critique of the tools that are
used to produce and propagate sonic identities, and idealized bodies after the internet.
26
71 J. Ugelvig, ‘Kate Cooper: Hypercapitalism and the digital body’, DIS Magazine, 2014, accessed 2
November 2014, http://dismagazine.com/dysmorphia/66668/kate-cooper-hypercapitalism-and-
the-digital-body/
72 ‘HDTV01 - Who Is Hannah Diamond?’ Online Video, 2015, accessed 9 February 2015, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZdJ8P1HAVA
73 H. Black, ‘Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Hot Babe’, The New Enquiry, 2014, accessed 12
January 2015, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/further-materials-toward-a-theory-of-the-hot-
babe/

27. These case studies illustrate two processually aligned yet aesthetically differing strategies for
aural critiques of the status of the body after the internet. While Holly Herndon’s work uses
granular tools to perform a structural critique of the cultural imagination of the form of the
network, Hannah Diamond’s work uses a similar granular processing to enact a critique of the
coercive subjectification that social media both produces and relies upon. In the concluding
chapter of this essay these critical approaches toward composition and sound design, will be
situated alongside efforts to comprehend the underlying material and oppressive contexts in
which images and subjectivities are generated and distributed online.
The New (Granular) Aesthetic
Without a concerted effort to raise the level of debate, we just loop over and over through the same
fetishizations and reifications, while the real business of the world continues unexamined. Those
who cannot understand technology are doomed to be consumed by it […] Technology is political.
Everything is political. If you cannot perceive the politics, the politics will be done to you.74
-James Bridle
In The New Aesthetics and its Politics, James Bridle argues that a willful lack of comprehension
of everyday technologies equates to an inability to perceive political power, as that power
increasingly radiates from “black-boxed, corporate-controlled objects, platforms and
services”75, and that these impervious objects and services are replacing open source,
decentralized and empowering technologies. An example of this power dynamic is the
influential role, described in the work of Harry Sanderson and discussed at length above,
that corporate representations of computation and networks as weightless and amorphous
play in obscuring from view the exploitative and oppressive economies of production.
As a response to this urgent call for a better informed understanding of quotidian
technologies and their underlying power structures, the present reading of Granular
Synthesis as a network technology itself, bears particular relevance. As has already been
discussed, whereas the earlier works of Microsound used the processes of granulation to
27
74 J. Bridle, ‘The New Aesthetics and its Politics’, in You Are Here - Art After The Internet, O. Kholeif,
Cornerhouse, London, 2014, pp. 20-27
75 ibid.

28. produce reduced or minimal sound-bodies76 (that behaved cybernetically but were stripped
of aural referent and signifier)77; the ‘network voice’ of Herndon occupies similar
morphologies whilst retaining its political dimension as pertaining to a body.
Other than the ‘imagined network’ of fluid and amorphous forms that Herndon’s
performance of becoming-cloud sonifies or makes aural, one possible model that could be
understood within a granular network-voice is that of decentralized file distribution. In
practice, swarm distribution technologies such as BitTorrent perform much the same
transformations as those performed upon the granular network-voice. Rather than download
files in a chronological, 'top-bottom' way, which would require full versions of files to be
available on a single server, torrents construct files from small packets of data, using a 'rarest
packet first' rule, from around the p2p network. This means that it is not necessary to have a
fully downloaded version of a file to contribute to its distribution on the network.
In dividing original files into packets, or an original body of music into dispersible bits,
BitTorrent is also dividing or encrypting bodies in a correlative, inverse process to Granular
Synthesis. The dissembled, partial files that torrents produce when incomplete exist as sliced
up versions of the original, and if played result as sound objects that recall ‘glitch’
Microsound's 'aesthetics of failure.'78 Here we can observe a processual metaphor; Granular
Synthesis as network, network as Granular Synthesis. Small traces of original works, spread
through a network, waiting to be whole again.
In decentralizing the distribution of these works, these traces are freely exchanged and
shared, and the value of that exchange is viewed exponentially in relation to the scarcity of a
full seeding of a file. Here sound files can be read as audio versions of Hito Steyerl’s concept
of the ‘Poor Image’79, constituting networks of exchange-value beyond their original
intended value or resolution. The ‘Poor Sound’ is also a useful tool for re-thinking the sound-
bodies of the granular network-voice, reframing them within a discourse of decentralized
sharing, away from that of reified non-signification.
28
76 Demers, op. cit.
77 Kollias, op. cit.
78 K. Cascone, ‘The aesthetics of failure: “Post-digital” tendencies in contemporary computer music’,
Computer Music Journal, 24(4), 2000 pp.12--18.
79 H. Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, in The Wretched of the Screen, Sternberg, Berlin, 2012 pp.
31-44

29. Conclusion
What is being argued for here is a better understanding of the underlying and inherent
systemic and processual metaphors that are at work within the technologies used for the
transformation of voice and body. Note also is that both of the case studies given here, along
with the vast majority of the contemporary practitioners employing granular processes to
perform such transformations are women, or queer. The transformation of the voice away
from original is a historically rich practice that has generally aimed to critique the complex
power structures at play within the voice.80
In transforming their voices to perform becoming-network, or becoming-Hot Babe, Holly
Herndon and Hannah Diamond engage with the cultural imaginary of the female body. In
doing so they begin to access and unfold the power relationships that these bodies are
indexical to; those of gender, sexuality, class and race. Such critiques of the voice speak of
oppression and privilege. As vocal manipulation and transformation are employed to
perform a political and social critique, then deeper understandings of the processes used to
achieve these critiques are necessary. In response, this essay has strived to provide tools to
better discern the network modeling at work in Granular Synthesis and has attempted to
unfold the cultural imaginations of technology’s form, and our bodies’ relationships to those
forms. Granular Synthesis therefore, may provide us with the compositional tools needed to
apprehend or model the networks that our bodies are increasingly enmeshed within.
Word Count: 7, 831
29

30. Bibliography
Abu Hamdan, Lawrence. ‘The Freedom of Speech Itself’, Cabinet, vol. 43, 2011 pp. 81-85.
‘A Year Offline, What I Have Learned: Paul Miller at TEDxEutropolis’, Online Video, 2013,
accessed 22 January 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trVzyG4zFMU
‘AniMiku Vocaloid Concert Live at Tora-Con’, Online Video, accessed 20 December 2014,
http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=fB9hWyaEkGc
Baudrillard, J., ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, Selected Writings, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1988
pp. 166-184.
Black, Hannah. ‘Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Hot Babe’, The New Enquiry, 2014,
accessed 12 January 2015, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/further-materials-toward-a-
theory-of-the-hot-babe/
Borkowski, Alex. ‘Song Of The Digital Flesh: Vocal Manipulation & Our Cyborg Selves’, The
Quietus, 2014, accessed 2 January 2015 at: http://thequietus.com/articles/15223-vocal-
manipulation-holly-herndon-burial-katie-gately
Bridle, James. ‘The New Aesthetics and its Politics’, in You Are Here - Art After The Internet, O.
Kholeif, Cornerhouse, London, 2014, pp. 20-27
Calm.com, Website, accessed 8 February 2015, https://www.calm.com/
Cascone, Kim. ‘The aesthetics of failure:“Post-digital” tendencies in contemporary computer
music.’ Computer Music Journal, 24(4), 2000, pp.12--18.
‘Cisco Unified Fabric: For a Better Life’, Online Video, 2011, accessed 27 December 2014,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKiXyyZ21nk
Connor, Michael. ‘First Look: Amalia Ulman-Excellences & Perfections’, Rhizome, 2014,
accessed 6 February 2015 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/oct/20/first-look-amalia-
ulmanexcellences-perfections/?ref=tags_amalia-ulman_post_readbtn
Crary Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Verso, London, 2013.
30

31. ‘Curtis Roads: Getting Granular’, Online Video, 2014, accessed 22 November 2014, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=buoTb83cxjM
Deleuze, Gilles. and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. 1st ed., University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, 1987.
Demers, Joanna ‘Minimal Objects in Microsound’, in Listening Through The Noise, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 2010, pp. 69-90
Eades, Diana.. ‘Applied Linguistics and Language Analysis in Asylum Seeker Cases,’ Applied
Linguistics, vol.26, no. 4, 2005, pp. 503-526.
Demers, Joanna. Listening Through the Noise. 1st ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010.
Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2006.
Goldberg, Roselee. ‘Laurie Anderson’, Thames & Hudson, London, 2000,
‘HDTV01 - Who Is Hannah Diamond?’ Online Video, 2015, accessed 9 February 2015,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZdJ8P1HAVA
Harman, Graham Towards Speculative Realism. 1st ed., Zero Books, Winchester, UK, 2010.
Harman, Graham, Objects and the Arts. Online Video, 2014, accessed 20 December 2014,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ0GR9bf00g
Harwood, Nick. ‘You Never Thought Seapunk Would Take It This Far’, Respect Magazine,
2012, accessed 4 January 2015, http://respect-mag.com/you-never-thought-seapunk-would-
take-it-this-far-zombelle-talks-azealia-banks-rihanna-the-week-the-second-internet-
exploded/
Herndon, Holly. Embodiment in Electronic Music Performance, MA Thesis, 2010, accessed 9th
January 2015, http://soundpractice.tumblr.com/post/24921349896/embodiment-in-
electronic-music-performance
Herndon, Holly. ‘Chorus’, Online Video, 2014, accessed 20 November 2014: https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHujh3yA3BE
Hookway, Branden. Interface, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2014.
31

32. Hurley, Paul. ‘On A Series of Queer Becomings: Selected Becomings-Invertebrate 2003-2005’,
Rhizomes, Issue 11/12, Fall/Winter 2006, accessed 6 February 2014,
‘Jacob Applebaum: To Protect And Infect Part 2’, Online Video, 2014, accessed 22 October
2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vILAlhwUgIU
Kinsey, Cadence, ‘From Post-Media to Post-Medium: Rethinking Ontology in Art and
Technology’, in Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology, Mute, London, 2013 p. 68-83
Kollias, Phivos-Angelos. ‘Iannis Xenakis and Systems Thinking’, Phivos-Angelos Kollias,
accessed 22 January 2015, http://phivos-angelos-kollias.com/papers/2011-
Xenakis_Conference.pdf
Melodyne, Website, accessed 8 February 2015, http://www.celemony.com/en/start
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding media. Routledge, London, 2012.
McHugh, Gene. ‘The Context of the Digital: A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships’, in You
Are Here - Art After The Internet, Cornerhouse, London, 2014, pp. 28-34
Microsound.org, Website, accessed 29 January 2015 http://microsound.org/
‘Nina Power & Hito Steyerl’, Online Video, 2014, accessed 20 December 2014 https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoqHQ05J22k
Power, Nina. ‘Soft Coercion, The City and the Recorded Female Voice’, in The Acoustic City,
Jovis, Berlin, 2014, pp. 23-26.
Roads, Curtis. Microsound. 1st ed., MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001.
Runyan, Mike. ‘Life In the Data Center Doesn’t Stop…When You Live Your Life’ in
(networked) Every Whisper Is A Crash On My Ears, Arcadia_Missa, London, 2014.
Sanderson, Harry. ‘Human Resolution’, Mute, accessed 2 January 2015, http://
www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/human-resolution
Steyerl, Hito. The wretched of the screen. 1st ed., Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2012.
Thomson, Phil. ‘Atoms and errors: towards a history and aesthetics of microsound’.
Organised Sound, 9(2), 2004 pp.207--218.
32

33. Tiqqun. Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. 1st ed., Semiotext(e) Los Angeles, CA,
2012.
Ugelvig, Jeppe. ‘Kate Cooper: Hypercapitalism and the digital body’, DIS Magazine, 2014,
accessed 2 November 2014, http://dismagazine.com/dysmorphia/66668/kate-cooper-
hypercapitalism-and-the-digital-body/
Vierkant, Artie. ‘The Image Object Post-Internet’, Rhizome, December 20th, 2010, acccessed 4
January 2015, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2010/dec/20/required-reading/
‘Vocaloid Singing Software’, Website, accessed 15 November 2014, http://
www.vocaloid.com/en/
Whitelaw, Mitchell. ‘Sound particles and microsonic materialism’. Contemporary Music
Review, 22(4), 2003 pp.93--101.
Wilkes Elvia. ‘Where looks don’t matter and only the best writers get laid: Subjectivity and
other unfulfilled promises of the text-based Internet’, in (networked) Every Whisper Is A Crash
On My Ears, Arcadia_Missa (eds.), Arcadia_Missa, London, 2014 pp. 33-48
Zoladz, Lindsay. ‘Rising: Holly Herndon’, Pitchfork, 2012, accessed 25 January 2015 http://
pitchfork.com/features/rising/8990-holly-herndon/On My Ears, Arcadia_Missa (eds.),
33

34. List of Works
Diamond, Hannah. Attachment, 2014
Diamond, Hannah. Pink and Blue, 2014
Dryhurst, Matthew. Dispatch, 2014
Gately, Katie. Pipes, 2014
Herndon, Holly. Chorus, 2014
Herndon, Holly. Movement, 2012.
Lund, Jonas. We See In Every Direction, 2014
Sanderson, Harry. Unified Fabric, 2013
Ulman, Amelia. Excellences and Perfections, 2014
Xenakis, Iannis. Concrete PH, 1958
34