Trans Vocals And Lack Thereof, pt. 1
May. 1st, 2023 04:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
utilitymonstergirl(I have no formal musical knowledge, and this is primarily about trans women because that's just who I've found so far, but I welcome additions in both areas.)
In my traipses through Weird Abrasive Trans Girls Of Bandcamp, I've noticed some interesting patterns in how trans musicians approach vocals. Due to a range of factors - dysphoria, lack of formal singing lessons or recording space, not having conventionally-gendered voices - it's common for them to use pitch-shifting, vocaloids, and samples (generally extremely uncleared). However, these styles aren't purely born out of lack or insecurity - all of them are used by musicians from all walks of life, and all are tied to modern digital cultures that trans people are often embedded in already. To be clear, unfiltered trans voices aren't absent at all - they're often just used very specifically.
Patricia Taxxon uses her unfiltered voice alongside all three tools. Sometimes they mix in the same song, like Spiral Staircase, a love-song duet between a Martian colonist (herself) and a rover (the vocaloid Bert Gotrax). On the intensely-processed album Gloria, her unfiltered voice shows up only at the end, singing a round with her pitch-shifted self on Girls. (These songs are also doing fascinating things with inserting trans women into love ballads and empowerment anthems, but that's another post. She's also done a great behind-the-scenes explainer of how and why Spiral Staircase sounds musically strange.)
Her latest album Agnes & Hilda has her voice on every track in some capacity, her first such album in a long time. She uses varying degrees of pitch-shifting and filtering on most of the tracks, to different effect each time. She contrasts with the featured vocalists on Your Throat Belies and I'll Be, slides between gruff intensity and bubbly pride on Bocce, makes sharp AI-art jokes on By Greg Rutkowski, and supplements her unfiltered voice on With My Tail To The World. The opening and closing tracks forgo distortion to make a clear artistic statement and powerfully deliver on it - Agnes & Hilda invites us to fuse the cerebral and indulgent sides of art, and Like is a guttingly-good love song about reaching out to a classmate in special ed.
The Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe sparingly uses samples and distortion on an intensely-personal concept album. It uses chapter-break interludes from a documentary on Mapplethorpe, some of the only samples here (though a friend spotted a bit of Ringside in Rawr.) The tracks with Taxxon's vocals intermix her filtered and unfiltered voice, but all the pitch-shifting distortion stops after Our Father. At this point, the narrator realizes that her relationship has to end, that her lover is happy to be a dad in the kink sense but not at all in the emotional one. The final act is full of despair, regret, and introspection with no comforting artifice.
She tends not to heavily use obvious samples outside of plunderphonics projects like Victory Lap, which just makes it hit harder when she samples Not Just Bikes in a murder ballad.
In my traipses through Weird Abrasive Trans Girls Of Bandcamp, I've noticed some interesting patterns in how trans musicians approach vocals. Due to a range of factors - dysphoria, lack of formal singing lessons or recording space, not having conventionally-gendered voices - it's common for them to use pitch-shifting, vocaloids, and samples (generally extremely uncleared). However, these styles aren't purely born out of lack or insecurity - all of them are used by musicians from all walks of life, and all are tied to modern digital cultures that trans people are often embedded in already. To be clear, unfiltered trans voices aren't absent at all - they're often just used very specifically.
Patricia Taxxon uses her unfiltered voice alongside all three tools. Sometimes they mix in the same song, like Spiral Staircase, a love-song duet between a Martian colonist (herself) and a rover (the vocaloid Bert Gotrax). On the intensely-processed album Gloria, her unfiltered voice shows up only at the end, singing a round with her pitch-shifted self on Girls. (These songs are also doing fascinating things with inserting trans women into love ballads and empowerment anthems, but that's another post. She's also done a great behind-the-scenes explainer of how and why Spiral Staircase sounds musically strange.)
Her latest album Agnes & Hilda has her voice on every track in some capacity, her first such album in a long time. She uses varying degrees of pitch-shifting and filtering on most of the tracks, to different effect each time. She contrasts with the featured vocalists on Your Throat Belies and I'll Be, slides between gruff intensity and bubbly pride on Bocce, makes sharp AI-art jokes on By Greg Rutkowski, and supplements her unfiltered voice on With My Tail To The World. The opening and closing tracks forgo distortion to make a clear artistic statement and powerfully deliver on it - Agnes & Hilda invites us to fuse the cerebral and indulgent sides of art, and Like is a guttingly-good love song about reaching out to a classmate in special ed.
The Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe sparingly uses samples and distortion on an intensely-personal concept album. It uses chapter-break interludes from a documentary on Mapplethorpe, some of the only samples here (though a friend spotted a bit of Ringside in Rawr.) The tracks with Taxxon's vocals intermix her filtered and unfiltered voice, but all the pitch-shifting distortion stops after Our Father. At this point, the narrator realizes that her relationship has to end, that her lover is happy to be a dad in the kink sense but not at all in the emotional one. The final act is full of despair, regret, and introspection with no comforting artifice.
She tends not to heavily use obvious samples outside of plunderphonics projects like Victory Lap, which just makes it hit harder when she samples Not Just Bikes in a murder ballad.
