The ever-expanding scope of technology in the last decades has seen conflicting theories reflecting on the potential for embodiment within a post-human framework. In her master’s thesis, »Embodiment in Electronic Music Performance,« Holly Herndon references Jean Baudrillard, who suggests the following about the impact of technology on culture and bodies: »[t]he human body, our body, seems superfluous in its proper expanse, in the complexity and the multiplicity of its organs, of its tissue and functions, because today everything is concentrated in the brains and the genetic code, which alone sum up the operational definition of being.« An opposing argument also cited by Herndon, though, highlights the unflinching truth of our animal presence on this planet, even in the face of technology’s pervasive, consuming, and heady network. She cites Allison Muri’s question, »what kind of logic has given rise to this equation of technology with disembodied consciousness and superfluous bodies?« and the tracing of »the impact of human excrement on the globe as a means of establishing the unavoidable reality that we all still inhabit bodies.« In accepting the philosophical and practical weight of the body in the face of technology, an important next step is to assess the nature of the interwoven, interactive relationship between the two.

Herndon’s own work reckons with the tenet voiced by cognitive scientist Anthony Chemero that »the tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you,« and depends on an understanding of Mark Hansen’s »integrated mind/body« rather than a »mind/body duality.« Technology’s role in thawing this duality mirrors its ability to loosen the societal grasp of the man/machine binary as well as the male/female one. In her essay »A Cyborg Manifesto,« Donna Haraway famously argues for the vision of the cyborg as a »condensed image of both imagination and material reality,« concurrently and iridescently physical and non-physical, human and machine, post-gendered. Haraway writes, »cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global embodiment after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth.« In her essay »Sonic Cyberfeminism and its Discontents,« Annie Goh echoes the warning of other cyberfeminist writers that the complete subsuming of the body into technology will »witnes[s] ›the ultimate dream of disembodiment‹ as the triumph of the patriarchal order.« As important as it is for cyberfeminism to see the dissolution of boundaries, it may be just as essential for it to hold onto strands of proof of physicality.

In the science fiction reality that Haraway paints as our world, we can creatively identify endless symbols of the continuum between mind and body, man and machine, neverending proof of the coupling of physicality and ether. What kinds of things weave or have control over this unifying strand? A suggestion that Herndon makes and that I also support is that the human voice contains a unique potential to highlight and express this interplay, and serves as a kind of moulding clay for an exploration of the dynamic between body and mind, material and ephemeral, human and machine. In playing this role, it then also bears the mark either of a neutralised, post-gendered identity or of a reinforced, caricatured symbol of traditional gender. Herndon cites David Toop, who describes the voice as:

»the sonic instrument with which we begin as humans — beginning as an intricate folding of inner and outer, ear, lungs, throat, skull, and mouth, abstract thought and physical projection, biology and consciousness, breath and listening and which develops as the articulation of impulsion, feeling, word, speech, paralinguistic noise, even musicality, resonating in time, mind and the air of open space. Throughout the 20th century, the voice was a prime site for the redefinition of the body in relation to the machine age, particularly during a rapidly developing era of disembodying technologies such as wireless telegraphy, radio, telephone, cinema, television, the tape recorder, electronic amplification and the microphone. Temporal shift, spatial displacement and the physical absence of the vocalizing agent, both implicit and explicit in such communicative extensions of the body, suggest a disintegration of the image of the body as a symbol of unity.«

In the voice’s replacement of the body as a site of negotiation between human and machine, the importance of physical touch also comes second to sonic touch. Holly Herndon recalls »long pubescent telephone marathons, pressing the receiver as close to my cheek as possible, as if to become closer to the person on the other end.

ASMR captures and replays this achy and ever-more-permanent moment of desired proximity. In ASMR audio and video, the distance or »non-standard intimacy« (as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner call it in their article, »Sex in Public«) manifests itself not only in the absence of physical presence but also in the fact that the nurturing is being done by strangers. As a teenager on the telephone, Herndon’s conversation partner was disembodied but known. In ASMR, devotees across the globe produce audio and video as a kind of playful public service, offering their highly characterised intimacy with anyone and everyone. With a focus on sound as tingle-triggering and immediately gratifying, the practice exists somewhere between pornography, therapy, and sound art. While often focused on non-vocal sounds such as nails scratching on a couch or hands painstakingly leafing through books or crinkling a bag of Doritos, ASMR videos just as often feature a single soothing voice whispering encouraging nothings into the microphone. The scenarios are often modeled on relaxing scenes we might have encountered as children: visits to the doctor or the hairdresser; calm, supportive lessons in painting á la Bob Ross. Many videos draw on clinical models or scenarios that offer a lathering of personal attention. Because the tingling or »braingasm« sensation is often triggered by situations or sounds that recall cozy memories, the audio and video is largely fueled by an amplified, cartoonish nostalgia.

One of the subjects of amplification is the gender binary. Mostly self-filmed by long-lashed, sugary-voiced women, many scenarios in ASMR videos represent caricatures of feminine tenderness: the application of makeup and the brushing of hair; the display of pastel-pink nails and low-cut blouses. There has been a significant contribution to the community by men as well (many ASMR websites provide different categories for male and female ASMRtists), but these additions often seem reactionary, symmetrically inflated in their portrayal of gender. The male ASMRtist Iggy M. Manley writes the following disclaimer under one of his YouTube videos:

»Tired of all those ASMR videos by women trying to put makeup on your face or showing you what's in their purses? Fuck that! Manley ASMR is a manly ASMR series for men, hosted by a man's man ... From boots to video games and tools, you'll find nothing but manly ASMR here. None of that female crap!«

The physical sensation ASMRtists seek to provoke via both voice and narrative would seem to depend on an exaggeration of a male/female gender binary. The ASMR community, however, might do itself a service by striving to show that the voice mustn't rely on the inflation of gender norms to be therapeutic. 

Auto-tuned ASMR

The CTM 2015 theme, »Un Tune,« is concerned with exploring the emotive, noncognitive, and unmediated impact that sound has on bodies and psyches. The theme is framed as an investigation of all sound’s capacity to affect in this way, but the play, exploration, and experimentation is theoretically to take place in the context of watching how technology enables, interacts with, complements, or complicates this power. The festival’s description of the theme states »artistic experimentation with the affective and somatic effects of sounds and frequencies opens up possibilities of tuning and de-tuning the composite that interconnects body, matter, energy and (musical) machines — and of exploring our perception.« In this statement, the concept of »tuning« describes technology’s interaction with and adjustment of sound more than the literal definition of »tuning« as pitch refinement in music; »tuning« might refer just as well to processing or amplification, for example, as to the adjustment of pitch. However, there is an instance in which certain technology employs and exemplifies both the metaphorical and the literal definition of the word »tune:« in tuning literally, as pitch-shifting, the corrective-turned-creative software Auto-Tune also »tunes« both the somatic potential of the voice and, in turn, the implications of identity and gender that go hand in hand with this voice.

Auto-Tune was originally developed by Andy Hildebrand at Antares Audio to correct and smooth-over singers’ faulty intonation in the recording studio. The program is able to nudge any note sung even slightly too low or high into the nearest semi-tone slot. In doing so, the original vocal source’s true sound quality is cloned; the program does its best to imitate the voice as it was recorded, say, a couple microtones flat, but the sound that replaces the erroneous singing is of course a new synthesis of the heard and machine-integral. The widespread use of Auto-Tune in the pop music industry has created a stir and raised questions not only about ethics and integrity but also about the extent of widely embraced stars’ talent. At its most subtle, Auto-Tune goes unnoticed and leaves in its wake no more than a mirage-like plastic sheen over the vocals on a track like Britney Spears’ »Alien,« and has a stabilising effect only evident when we hear what the original recording sounded like without the corrective software (when we’re lucky enough to get wind of a leak)

Its distortive potential as a sound effect was discovered at some point in the context of its cosmetic application in the recording studio. The more aggressive the setting and the more slurred the sung phrase, the more Auto-Tune jolts in its role from corrective and complementary (its use was compared by Hildebrand, its creator, to the application of makeup) to metamorphic. Over the last two decades it has reared its head as an effect akin to the classic vocoder and has shared an equivalently involved love affair with pop music. It was Cher’s single »Believe« in 1998 that patented the use of the software as vocal disguise. As Sasha Frere-Jones points out in his article about Auto-Tune for the New Yorker, Cher’s decisions about which phrases of the song to shroud with the software foreshadow decades of the program’s use as an indicator of either sub- or super-humanness: her voice is at its least recognisable and most digitised when she sings, »...and I can’t break through,« and completely her own when she asks, »do you believe in life after love?« »You can only feel so bad for a robot,« Frere-Jones writes.

Similar to its vocoder relative, Auto-Tune breaches the territory of the »alien« or »other« in its use as an effect and represents an ideal of futurism, post-humanism, and outer space. It is no accident that the post-humanistic implications are consequences of the manipulation of a natural voice – the voice, the original symbol of embodiment and the allying glue between mind and body, becomes clad in an ultra-flexible metal sheath and hardly recognises itself. The program as a distorter removes the individuality of the voice, digitises and standardises it. Many songs that employ Auto-Tune as an effect make use of its potential to robotise, but often the resulting robot character retains bastions of gender. T-Pain, Lil’ Wayne, and Kanye West wouldn’t let the tool interfere with the macho stance of their songs, but they’ve all used it to symbolise an exploration of the outer limits of human expression and feeling and the condition of a lost or broken soul. Rolling Stone critic Jody Rosen writes, »it’s a painterly device for enhancing vocal expressiveness and upping the pathos.« West, for example, chose to use Auto-Tune for the first time on the single »Heartless,« which reacts to the loss of his mother. Rosen notes, »Kanye’s digitised vocals are the sound of a man so stupefied by grief, he’s become less than human.« Rihanna also uses it in her song »Disturbia« to emphasise the portrayal of a sub-human suffering, and Lil Wayne used it in albums Tha Carter II and Tha Carter III to give voice to his loneliness and depression as compromised, metamorphosed conditions. At its most flexible, though, Auto-Tune holds the key to gender-neutralisation and androgyny, if the artist chooses that as his/her agenda. The software not only unitises melismas into a broken half-step scale but also extends vocal range limitlessly; when sung through »the gerbil« (as the program is termed in the recording industry), the female voice, for example, can sound three octaves below its natural limit and the male voice three octaves above. A boundless continuum of pitch and therefore gender implication is at the disposal of any singer. In his song, »To Care (Like You),« James Blake frames a dialogue between at least one male and one female and uses a pitch shifter to produce all voices from his own. He poses therefore not as a single, omni-voiced cyborg but as several opposing gendered figures.

In his performance, »The Voice is False,« Swedish artist and academic Siri Landgren speaks and sings through Auto-Tune, simultaneously describing and demonstrating the androgyny the software is capable of representing. He compares the reception of the Auto-Tuned voice to that of the falsetto (stemming from »false«) voice; »it does not give a correct or easily interpreted image of the body which constitutes its source. Is this a man, a woman? An adult or a child?...The voice is false like the hybrid is false.«

How far away is singing with a voice signaling a gender binary from the therapy that the ASMR community hopes to achieve? And how far away is singing with the gender-neutralised Auto-Tuned voice? Is the processed voice one step further from inciting a »braingasm,« or just as close? Auto-Tuned voices affect us emotionally and intellectually, rev us up mood-wise and symbolise the perfect cyborg philosophically, but can they give us tingles? What effect does the dissolution of gender boundaries in vocal representation have on the somatic power of this sonic contact?

In »O Superman (for Massenet),« Laurie Anderson champions the vocoder, embodies androgyny, breaks hearts, and induces chills, proving the potential that the synthesised voice has for soul and touch. She realises that, as Dave Tompkins writes in his book How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, »what’s more human than wanting to be something else altogether?« The song depicts a conversation between a narrator and an unknown voice. After at first imitating the narrator’s mother, it says, »You don’t know me, but I know you.« And then, »So hold me, Mom, in your long arms...in your automatic arms, your electronic arms, in your arms.«