3 Notes on Sound: Trans* Revision
Lorelei d’Andriole
Coming Out
In 2020, while in graduate school for intermedia at the University of Iowa’s School for Art, Art History, and Design, I co-wrote a manifesto on sound with poet Kayl Lockett. I was in a graduate program where I was told by faculty and peers that they did not know how to talk about my work because my work was exploring sound. This seemed clearer to my friends in the outsider arts community of Iowa City and other graduate students in the Music, Cinematic Arts, and Literary Translation Programs. After a printmaking MFA told me, “I think your work is really cool, I just don’t know how to talk about sound.” I resolved to create a document that would educate my studio arts audience before they could enter into a critical dialogue with my work. While this was a reaction to my previous frustration, my ultimate the goal was self-preservation, and the skills I developed in navigating the defence of the formal qualities of sound within the arts would become foundational for my work on trans* becoming.
I was not out yet as a queer trans woman, and it was through my work in instrument building and experimental radio that I first felt the freedom to explore my body. I came to realize that I was not who I thought I was. My gender liberation took place during performances in which I could share my secret. I was invited to participate in a local experimental music series called iHearIC with a jazz trio and a solo pianist. I brought two punks to perform with me who set up an excessive amount of music equipment only to pantomime performing along to an elevator music record I spun through two massive speakers. Halfway through the record, I walked off stage and left the building only to return with a city-owned garbage can that I used to push through the crowd and onto the stage. I’m trans and I’m afraid!” in a sort of falsetto that my friends in the emo/screamo[1] community have described as “the chirp.” My confession was illegible to the audience, and I felt closer to womanhood when I emerged from my Waste Management womb. In truth, this was the second time I performed a coming out publicly. The first time was over the airwaves of the University of Iowa radio station, KRUI. The exciting thing about radio is that no one is listening, and yet the electromagnetic waves travelled through the bodies of the eighty thousand or so humans within listening range of the station and onward through the cosmos. Unlike coming out on online social media platforms, there is no opportunity for immediate feedback. On the radio you can be mostly anonymous if you use a pseudonym and leave the station’s landline telephone off the hook.
Instrument Building and Feedback
Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making is what brought me around to the idea of a synesthetic object. The object is comprised of a wooden box with a tape recorder playing the sounds of the artist building the box.[2] In Noise, Water, Meat, Dougla