Resonance guest editor Charles Eppley speaks with the sound artists and audio producers JT Green and Ariana Martinez about their creative practices and personal experiences navigating the world of commercial audio from a queer, trans, and disabled perspective. In this conversation, Green and Martinez contextualize the motivations of their personal and professional work within an intersectional framework, and ruminate on the urgency of thinking, and publicly talking about, queer sound as a strategy for creative growth, community building, and self-discovery.

Charles Eppley:

It was very serendipitous, JT, that I was developing this special section of Resonance when I saw your tweet earlier this year.1 You asked, “What makes a sound queer?”

JT Green:

Right.

Charles:

And it was like, “Oh, wow! This is perfect!” I’m really glad to be speaking with both of you as audio producers and creators of sound. The question of queer sound is very loaded at this moment. In the US, there is a sweeping anti-trans legislation movement. And so, for me, the question “What is queer sound?” is not philosophizing or pontificating on some abstract concept. It’s asked in response to real and urgent sociopolitical circumstances. This series is also about considering a bridge between academics and artists, a series on the politics and positionality of queer sound and listening that crosses social and professional fields. To begin, can you describe how you came to sound production? What strategies does queer listening offer to you as a response to the realities of anti-Blackness, homophobia, and transphobia?

Ariana Martinez:

JT, you wanna go first?

JT:

Okay. What would I call myself? I’m an artist, an educator, and a writer. I run a production company called Molten Heart by day, and outside of that I am a practicing artist.

I think a lot about how we express gender on the internet. I think about that fusion of health and personal technology, and a lot about the spiritual nature of sound. I got into this field completely from the world of conceptual art. That is what I studied in school, along with design practices, mostly visual and digital design. My art practice combines those fields, but primarily in sculpture, performance, and sound art. Through a winding road, I pivoted my career from mainly working as a visual designer to being an audio professional.

Ariana:

I have my own shockingly similar jagged path. I always first identify as an artist in terms of my profession. I currently work as a sound designer and engineer on client-based projects across collaborative teams. But I make my own sound, sound art, and narrative audio work that touches many topics. The running throughline of my work, what I’m starting to understand, is a real preoccupation with navigation—how we literally and physically move through space, particularly as bodyminds that aren’t normative. I think about social and relational contexts within geography and culture. Physical movement, social movement, and dialogue as a kind of mapping. How we can trace conversational, imaginative, historical, and cultural paths. I think sound is a powerful medium for logging and capturing those movements, because it is both time-based and spatial. We can manipulate and change both of those qualities.

I also came to sound from a fine arts background. I studied sculpture and also have an academic background in urban studies. My understanding around place and space is grounded in theory and history and practice-based fieldwork. I made a lot of publicly situated artworks at the tail end of my undergraduate work. I ended up working in sound and video because it gave me access to spaces that would be resistant to an artist who was working with physical materials that could intrude upon that space. For example, I’ve done work at former military sites. I’ve done work in construction sites. I’ve done work in places where, if I had brought physical objects, they would have not been allowed on principle. But sound doesn’t touch anything, so it was easier to move through those spaces. From doing that work, I started experimenting with small documentary features, and that’s how I built my portfolio, which enabled me to start working as a professional in the sound field.

Charles:

Having studied art and conceptual art and multimedia art, sound art in particular, I think it really gives you a unique perspective on not only the question of queer sound but also of the artistic and professional fields in which you work. I feel like most audio professionals feel that they’re artists, right? That what they do is a form of art. But there’s this pervasive distinction between fine art and commercial art (or high/low art). That’s an artificial barrier between creative practices that prevents important conversations from happening, such as that of queer sound.

Ariana:

Totally.

Charles:

In fact, I looked at your website earlier, Ariana, and the work Pastel Demolition (2017) stood out to me—and not to put you on the spot. But I will put it in the chat. Yes, JT hasn’t seen it.

Ariana:

Yeah, of course, that’s very funny. That was a specifically, like, queer and collaborative installation artwork with another queer artist, Yannik Stevens.

Charles:

Well, I was looking at it, and I got this sense, like…“This feels a little queer.” [Laughter] It has a field recording of a thunderstorm, which I want to hear more about, but the whole formal and conceptual approach to this work…I immediately kind of felt, you know, a vibe coming from it. Could you describe the piece?

Figure 1.

Ariana Martinez and Yannik Stevens, Pastel Demolition (2017). Mixed media installation with sound. Courtesy the artists.

Figure 1.

Ariana Martinez and Yannik Stevens, Pastel Demolition (2017). Mixed media installation with sound. Courtesy the artists.

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Ariana:

This is quite an old work. It’s from my final year of undergraduate education. My friend and collaborator, Yannik, is also a queer person. At the time, I was still very privately thinking about my own gender and sexuality. There’s no mention of queer embodiment or whatever. It wasn’t like, “This is a queer exhibition!” This was the first time I was in direct collaboration with another queer artist, and making a very queer show on purpose.

The premise was that Yannik and I had basically like 24-hour access to this one exhibition space. This show came together in that time, from an hour-by-hour standpoint: collecting these materials, deciding how to construct these little objects, build these sites. I think of them each as a narrative island, or a kind of experience. They’re separate but together. They can be read like a construction site—you can piece together that some larger construction is happening, something larger that is supposed to exist here, but all you’re getting right now are pieces and fragments. The work is made up of these little sites built by Yannik and me. Some of them were based on an idea that one of us had, and we kind of checked in with each other to see if we felt it was something that should go in this world. And you know, kind of being like, “Oh, yes, but did you maybe think about it this way?” or like, “Yeah, I don’t need to know what’s going on. You just do your own thing!” For example, when Yannik made the vinyl tarp with the smashed neon pink light bulbs, they were looking at works by Felix Gonzales-Torres. That’s a very legible queer reference, right?

That material vocabulary is not necessarily like a purposeful footnote, but it’s also not an accident either, right? The fact that this artist’s work wound up in Yannik’s visual vocabulary, and resulted in this use of this material in this way. Whereas for me, I thought about, you know, artists who don’t necessarily identify as queer, but they work in ways that are disruptive to spaces and systems. I looked at Gabriel Orozco, who’s a Mexican artist that works site-specifically, pulling things from his own environment and reconfiguring them directly on the street. I wanted to explore what happens when infrastructure systems are messed up, either by design or by direct intervention.

In Pastel Demolition, this little fragment of imaginary asphalt with these pebbles…each one was made by hand, rolling each one out of clay. Yannik contributed these tiny little laser-cut hearts in the rubble. I was thinking about legibility and illegibility—about what is or is not available to the casual observer. I think that’s a queer approach that still exists in my work, and how I work with indirect and subliminal information, such as codes and stand-ins. You know, there’s a punching bag in this piece. It’s made out of a mattress topper. In some ways, it’s a body, right? It’s a stand-in for a body that feels raw, exposed, and really subject to, you know, the impacts of other people and systems. There’s also a gentle children’s play mat underneath, and it can also be read as a very gay wrestling mat, depending on what associations you’re bringing to the work as a viewer and listener.

Figure 2.

Ariana Martinez and Yannik Stevens, Pastel Demolition (2017). Mixed media installation with sound. Courtesy the artists.

Figure 2.

Ariana Martinez and Yannik Stevens, Pastel Demolition (2017). Mixed media installation with sound. Courtesy the artists.

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Charles:

I appreciate that description. (By the way, it has a great color palette!) It’s a great assemblage of materials. As a work of installation art, there’s no one singular object to focus on—these sites are working in tandem with each other. And it’s collaboratively produced.

The description says: “It’s spring, and the cracked asphalt was carpeted in broken glass with flowers, we’re nursing bruises, still tender from the fall.” This prose gets to some values and strategies of queer community, right? Of you and Yannik being there for each other right? And building this thing together, right, which is representative of various parts of yourselves individually, and collectively. I think that’s a great strategy of queerness and of queer experience and embodiment being rendered in this work.

And, yes, there’s the audio recording of the thunderstorm. But all this other stuff makes sound too! This installation must have had a great variety of sounds that have reverberated and are now gone. But we have photographic evidence. There’s literally the sound recording, but the rest of this I would interpret as being very invested in sound making and in queer sound particularly.

Figure 3.

Ariana Martinez and Yannik Stevens, detail of Pastel Demolition (2017). Mixed media installation with sound. Courtesy the artists.

Figure 3.

Ariana Martinez and Yannik Stevens, detail of Pastel Demolition (2017). Mixed media installation with sound. Courtesy the artists.

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Ariana:

Yes. Actually, people were using the punching bag at the opening. People were playing with it and engaging each other in very physical, and sometimes strangely unbounded, ways. The thunderstorm recording also existed in these gray hollow tubes. There’s a speaker embedded in those tubes, which are made of cardboard and covered with felt. Have you ever yelled in a construction site? There are often these large concrete cylindrical objects. I think they’re used for water or gas lines underground.

I was trying to go for that feeling of yelling into one of these tubes, where sound is captured but also exploded, because of the shape. In this space, you couldn’t tell where the sound came from exactly. That was important to me, because I wanted to explore how sound could lay a groundwork for a feeling, rather than be a discrete object to perceive. How can you use sound and listening to manipulate the feeling of a space in this unseen way?

Charles:

I think that strategy plays well with concepts of concealment and revelation. Those are also really important ideas for audio production in general, right?

Ariana:

Yeah.

Charles:

JT, I read the piece that you wrote for Transom recently, in which you discuss audio production and sound design in architectural terms. You used the term muxture to describe the possibilities, boundaries, and affordances of audio for sound design, composition, and storytelling, in which certain things are concealed and revealed to the listener according to your goals as an artist. This allows for contrast and juxtaposition of acousmatic or narrative form.

I think this strategy is apparent in your collaboration with Jemma Rose Brown, Marcus Brittain Fleming, and Sophia Wang Sohn in Transformation Through Repetition (2022), a domestic performance piece documented as part of your audio zine U+1F60C.

I read through the transcript and noticed all these great captions that are included with the transcribed speech. You use captions to reveal some of the sonic ephemera of the conversation, and the interactions of the people. Examples include:

[deep group exhale between four people]

[exhales begin rhythmically, moving faster in BPM]

[lip smack]

[mirrored exhales between four people turn into giggles]

It’s great to see attention to those events and interactions—interactions that typically would be removed, because they’re not understood to be a part of the speech, or the proper conversation. But of course they are, and the way that you approach that reality, and make space for that information, gives value to very interpersonal moments: those expressions that may come between words, or between linguistic expressions. Do you feel that this approach embodies a type of queer listening?

Figure 4.

Marcus Brittain Fleming, Sophia Wang Sohn, and JT Green, Transformation through Repetition (2022). Video. Courtesy the artists.

Figure 4.

Marcus Brittain Fleming, Sophia Wang Sohn, and JT Green, Transformation through Repetition (2022). Video. Courtesy the artists.

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JT:

Thank you so much for unsurfacing this piece, and particularly for talking about U+1F60C. I can start with the inspiration behind the audio zine.

The inspiration for the zine was this: I find myself a collector of very interesting sounds and moments in my life. And in lieu of taking a photograph or a short video, I like to record sound when there is a moment that feels introspective or somewhat cinematic to me, when there’s some sort of property that evokes a feeling. I had all of these sounds just lying on my various devices, and wanted to share this sort of hazy feeling with other people. That’s where the idea of the zine was born. Thinking about what Ariana discussed in regards to secret languages and hidden meanings, the name of the zine is actually an emoji unicode…that particular unicode (U+1F60C), the emoji “bliss” face, which is my favorite.

[Charles posts to the Zoom chat.]

Ariana:

Oh, I love that!

JT:

That’s the one! It’s interesting that you bring this up. I’ve never actually had to discuss the reasons why I’ve named and created this ever before.

Charles:

Sorry to put you on the spot!

JT:

It’s okay! I appreciate it. I think there’s something really special in queerness, particularly in this idea of a wink and a nudge—sort of speaking in code, speaking in languages that do not necessarily give things away. Forcing people to do a little bit of work to figure out if they are on the inside or outside. I think that’s particularly why that name is so obscure. It finds itself kind of nestled within like multiple meetings. Frankly, the bliss face is just, like, whenever I personally feel gender euphoria.

Transformation Through Repetition was a collaboration with a couple other friends who are artists as well, and two of them, Marcus and Gemma, work in movement. This is a performance that we did at Gemma’s apartment. Basically, one person does a gesture, and another person has to then complete or advance the gesture, and so on. You essentially make sculptures with your body. This sense of interlocking with each other, and of interdependence, strong communication, even though at many times we were totally silent.

I was definitely inspired by Christine Sun Kim and her work with captions. I just love the poetry of it. The relationship between my work and queerness is sort of like a kernel, a raw interpretation of a feeling—it’s one thing to exhale, but it’s another thing to exhale rhythmically, like “moving faster in BPM,” there’s something that just feels very poetic.

Charles:

Yeah, I was thinking of Christine’s work as I read this. It reminded me of some of the work that I do as a sound describer in disability arts circles. There is an opportunity for creative play in description and captions, and to not simply view description or captioning as this purely objective top-down approach to accessibility, which comes from a hearing approach, and which also strips people of any creativity. I think it reflects a fear of playfulness in accessibility, right?

A connection that I’m seeing and hearing between your practices is this resistance to normativity. And that’s a core component of queer experience. And so, JT, when you’re speaking of this collaborative creation of space, through body movement, through merging your body with that of another person, it seems like you’re de-individuating in some way. You’re becoming a collective whole. That’s not how typically we think of domestic space—from a normative standpoint. There’s a queerness innate in the very nature of that piece, and it’s something that I also sense in Ariana’s collaboration with Yannik. The way you approached that work comes from a positionality of queer experience. This is creative improvised collaboration as a form of queer expression.

I want to return to your original tweet, JT, in which you asked, “What makes a sound queer?” You actually gave a few examples:

  • The wind from an iPhone voice memo

  • Low-pass filters

  • The knocking of an XLR cable against a mounted shotgun mic

  • Jewelry knocking against surfaces during an interview

  • Overdubbed narration, particularly whispering

Ariana, you responded, adding your own examples:

  • Intros that lack dialogue for a few seconds longer than comfortable to most listeners

  • Beginnings or ends of voice memo tape that reveal their settings: bed, coat pocket, etc.

  • Subliminal tones

“Subliminal tones” actually makes a lot of sense after hearing you discuss your practice. And JT, your use of coding—it’s not really a camp aesthetic, but you seem to use a sort of wink-wink, nudge-nudge queer irony or sarcasm.

JT:

Yeah. Totally.

Charles:

Another user suggested “Fingers drumming on a table,” which I’m interpreting as a stim, you know? I have my fidget spinner here. [Charles twirls a tie-dyed fidget spinner on screen.] I’m reading that comment through a disability lens—finger tapping to deal with anxiety or ADHD. That’s something that would be coded as a chaotic interruption in a radio interview or audio narration, something unprofessional that would not make it into the finished piece normally. I want to invite reflection on these examples. I know I’m asking you to explain a joke, and that’s never a good idea—but do either of you have any thoughts on why and how these examples feel queer?

JT:

I’m trying to go back to that day. I’m still smiling thinking about those examples, because they just really warm me up. I was inspired to ask this aloud because of a conversation that I had with another friend of mine not too long ago, about a similar phenomenon. That conversation was not about sound, but rather about typography. I live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and there’s a lot of turnover with businesses. Some businesses will close and new ones pop up immediately. When I was walking around with this friend, we talked about how you can just tell that a business is Black owned by the design of its typography. Nine times out of ten we were right. I then thought about that in regards to music. When you hear music, and you can just feel, “Oh, this is totally produced for me!” There are these little things that you can sense, whether it’s a particular rhythm, or just a way that something sounds Black.

I felt the same things when I listened to music and would just like, have a hint of something, and not even like a lyrical thing—it could be house or techno, very instrumental music…just the sounds, I would feel like this artist is queer. And again I was right nine times out of ten! I was curious if other people had thought about that as well: What sounds queer?

And honestly, some conversations that you and I had, Ariana, in regards to art movements, and thinking about a collective aesthetic, influenced my thinking. I was thinking about the conversations that we had about regional audio aesthetics and thinking about audio, queer aesthetics, etc. As far as the other part of your question, about what particularly makes a sound queer, I think its criteria for me is some disruption of the norm. Something that is usually edited out of the process that has been left in, and a revealing of the infrastructure of the piece—a revealing of the equipment that is being used. It feels like the equivalent of a queer house with an exposed frame. What do you think, Ariana?

Ariana:

There are architectural things that feel queer to me. This is a big part of my sculptural work. Things that are slightly the wrong size for the space that they’re in. Things that don’t fit. Or when there’s no attempt to correct the things that feel off, you know? And I think queer sound in some ways, not just only lives with and accepts those things that feel off, but it actively embraces and amplifies those things precisely because they are disruptive, bothersome, and challenging.

JT:

Right! Exactly. I am thinking about a four-legged stool. But one of the legs is just slightly off.

Ariana:

Yeah. Of course, there’s something about failure too—

JT:

Jack Halberstam!

Ariana:

Yeah! Exactly.

JT:

You know, when I take this microphone and rattle it before I speak [JT rattles microphone to create noise], to me that feels like a queer gesture.

Ariana:

Can I add thoughts at this point? I think there’s an interesting overlap between things that have been identified in this conversation to feel queer, and things that might to the casual listener appear inexperienced or accidental—a failure of the [sound production] process. This is about queerness being an always-state of experimentation and exploration. We are always new to our own queerness and to everybody else’s.

Queer sound keeps moving even through things that the cishet normative world tries to iron out, perfect, and erase—or pretend it doesn’t happen. And I think queer sound is saying, “No, no, that’s all part of the archive and the palimpsest of queer communication.” It’s all layered. And we keep it all.

You can correct me if I’m wrong, JT, but I think it’s fair to say on the record that we both understand disability and queerness as related experiences. A lot of the things, Charles, that you are reading as disabled—those are not lost on us either, and it’s something that JT and I have thought about deliberately together. You know, queer sounds also sound like stim sounds because they are stims: a lot of disabled people are queer.

That’s exciting to me. I take a lot of pleasure when people pick up on that connection, or think that might be happening in my own work, or the way that I talk about my work. It’s a part of my experience that was not legible for a long time. Being able to talk about it in relation to queerness and transness has made it possible for me to view all those things as inextricable.

To a certain degree, this has given me more narrative power, understanding, and agency. They’re all fluctuating and very legible now. I think sometimes, when you are only checking off one of your identity boxes at a time, you feel forced to be completely legible as that identity box whenever you identify yourself in that way. But if I’m like, “No, these are really tangled constellations of things,” they will appear in my work in ways that are legible to some because of lived experience and not as legible to others (and that’s fine with me).

Charles:

The connections between queerness and disability are strong. People “come out” as disabled, right? The whole notion of masking and unmasking…and there are also shared histories of being pathologized and institutionalized. The idea that being gay or trans is a sickness, for example, or that being disabled is a personal moral failure.

As a queer person, a disabled person, or a queer disabled person, you negotiate with medical institutions that create essentialized and medicalized definitions of your experience. These definitions can be weaponized. People claim this or that experience doesn’t count because it doesn’t meet some narrow criteria defined by able-bodied/minded and/or cishet people. Do we really want the DSM-5 or the ADA to unilaterally define queer disabled experience?

You’ve both discussed how this idea manifests in your work, and how queer sound goes against normative expectations of sonic media: radio, podcasts, music, video, whatever. Errors can be viewed as accidents or oversights—a lack of professionalism—when, in fact, they are reclamations of a queer vernacular language. JT, you say that failures are not only revealed, but can be amplified precisely to signal to other queer folks that, yes, there’s a queer person involved. Other people may hear it, but they think it’s an error, distortion, or noise.

The media scholar Whit Pow writes about this in “The Transistoriography of Glitches and Errors,” which examines video art through the gesture of the glitch: distorted images and visual errors.2 They describe glitching as a historically trans mode of media production. I sense a similarity to how both of you approach the error in audio production. These so-called mistakes for you are crucial to the queer sound production process, and to the creation of queer community. But as professionals, how do you work within the commercial pressures of normativity?

Ariana:

My professional experience has always been piecemeal freelance work with occasional long-term contracts with single clients, rather than running my own company. I didn’t have high-profile projects or clients. They were all with other independent producers, many of whom were queer or disabled themselves. There was not a lot of negotiating in those circumstances. One of the biggest projects I worked on was for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was hired as a sound designer for Immaterial (2022–present), a podcast that explores how raw materials like jade, concrete, or paper became art-making materials across cultures and time.3 I was hired because the production team was familiar with my work and my aesthetic. I was deliberately hired for the touch that I have. There has to be a hyper sensory awareness in order to make the show the way that I made it. To me that was a direct result of neurodivergence. My entire way of working with sound, being able to translate one type of sensory information into another…it’s not some special artistic talent, it’s just literally how my brain makes sense of experience, of sensory information, or sometimes my failure to make sense of it.

Through queerness, I think about the relationality of objects. There’s a whole branch of queer studies about when objects feel queer, or when we feel queer feelings toward/with/about objects. This is a very private part of my experience and practice, but it comes from early experiments sculpturally with making queer objects, right?

When this podcast focused on particular art objects, my ability to connect with those objects in a narrative way was a direct result of my queerness and my attention to objects in a queer way—queerness is a relational mode that extends beyond my human-to-human interactions. It extends toward my relationships to everything in the world, and changes and intensifies and transforms those relationships.

It’s funny. People might think, “Oh, we hired this person to do this one thing because they do it so well, and so differently. They have such a clear artistic sensibility.” But if you are familiar with me as a person, you know that this artistic sensibility is a direct result of the ways I navigate the world, you know, as a queer and trans and disabled person. That’s why my work sounds like it does, you know?

I would have a very difficult time working on shows that don’t want or need that sensibility. I’ve never worked daily news. I’ve never worked on a show that had a really set structure. Immaterial was entirely new. We kind of invented it from the ground up. I had a lot of narrative control even as a sound designer, so it sounds like me, you know, because it was allowed to. Maybe they weren’t even sure at the outset to what extent it would be so shaped by the sound.

I don’t apply to normative jobs in normative media institutions. I don’t attempt to work at the New York Times for a reason, you know? There is some sacrifice, I will say. But I’m gonna prioritize my artistic sensibility because I have to prioritize the ways I move through the world.

Charles:

Thank you for sharing that. It’s not anthropocentric. You approach the world from a different perspective than what is typically expected. It reminds me of other queer sonic artists, like Jules Gimbrone, who mediate relationality between people and objects. Seeing for many is a way of owning—seeing as a way of controlling. The same can be said for sound and listening. Humans listen to control. But you’re trying to give the world around you more agency—

Ariana:

Yeah.

Charles:

—and respect, or space to just be. Maybe this is a queer modality of experience, or a queer phenomenology? JT, how do you negotiate normative expectations?

JT:

For a good chunk of my audio career, and especially now as I’m running a business, I’ve negotiated that by framing my way of thinking and working in relation to the market. Like Ariana, I’m queer, trans, and disabled. How I think about and interpret the world, and direct how things are gonna come across in sound, is going to be different. I’ve reframed that difference as a benefit to the market.

One production that my company worked on was Finding Tamika (2022), a project that entered the very saturated true crime market.4 It looked at a missing Black woman and asked, “Why was her case ignored in the media so much?” I was brought on because of my particular voice and aesthetic, much like Ariana. One negotiation that we as a company made was that one episode in this ten-part series would be 80 percent wordless. It was essentially a sound bath for 25 minutes utilizing archival audio from Tamika Huston, whom the series was about. It was almost a spiritual art piece in her memory. That was one of the first things, at the beginning of the project, that we felt really needed to be in this series, because it honors the person whose story we’re telling. Looking back, there was a lot of inherent queerness in that idea. I think a lot about queer interiority and collectivism in my work. That entire episode was this beautiful handshake between the host, the women we were doing this in honor of, and the musicians for the piece. There was a little bit of pushback. But I negotiated it by stating that this is something that will stand out in a crowded market that sounds like XYZ. In order to make space for this idea, we had to find some type of way to then speak the language of capitalism in order to produce very inventive work. We got it through to the final project. The series has been winning many awards because it has a very different point of view on such a tired genre.

On the other side of the coin, it’s been very difficult working in normative spaces. A lot of the reason why I started a company was because I found it very hard to find places that accommodated people like me. I was like, “I wonder if I can make a better place?” Queer, trans, disabled folks. There’s an inherent recognition of our difference in our queerness, like within the building of a company culture.

It’s been an uphill battle to push boundaries, knowing that 80 percent of that work will be cut out of the final product. But I’ve learned how to speak the language of the stakeholders in order to essentially push the queer sound agenda. [Laughter]

Charles:

You’re not supposed to say that in public!

Ariana:

We’re not supposed to have an agenda? Is that threatening?

Charles:

JT, you created your own company out of necessity. It sounds like maybe you hadn’t thought about creating a company in the past, but were compelled to by the various prejudices that are baked into productivity culture, and the capitalist agenda which disallows, prevents, and excludes queer, disabled, and neurodivergent people. In that environment, we’re judged according to expectations that are designed to filter out certain experiences, or types of expression or workflow that are coded as not only atypical, but unprofessional. This reminded me of Black Trans Media, which comes at it from a similar perspective—they have a different focus as an organization—but they’re coming at this field of media production with these experiences of being excluded, minimized, marginalized, and exploited.

A recurring theme here is communality, interdependence, and of working with what you have, you know, in front of you—whether it’s the rolls of plastic and foam that were used in Pastel Demolition, or creating your own company out of necessity. Queer people need to live, right?

JT, you mentioned wanting to see if other people were sitting with similar questions of what makes sound queer, and several people responded. Is there some urgency to the question? Is this a philosophical and abstract question—a sort of logic puzzle? What’s at stake in thinking and talking about how sound and queerness interrelate at this moment in time?

JT:

When I asked that question, I wasn’t consciously thinking about the urgency of it. I realize now that it was no accident that I asked this question publicly. I think there are a couple reasons. First, there is some urgency for myself, as in the last year or so, I’ve been publicly coming into my queerness, and over the last couple of months, publicly coming into my transness. Having this happen simultaneously, while noticing that a lot of trans folks are under attack, I think that I was searching for community and seeing where my fellow people were. Especially asking that question on a platform where it would be sandwiched between news about some murder or bill, or law, or terrible op-ed. I think that I wanted to…put a beacon out, and also provide a silent way for others to signal, if they weren’t completely out, or kind of dipping their toe into queerness. I could see conversations pop up on my timeline years ago, when I wasn’t really out, and I would retweet them as a way to test what it means to be queer online. Posting that question felt like a way to do that same thing for some people who are trying to play with their queerness online.

Charles:

Thank you for sharing that.

Ariana:

I will say, when I teach sound, I begin actually with a theoretical section that asks what sound is for. I deliberately lay out that I use sound as, and think sound is particularly good at, infiltration. Sound is good at delivering information into places, and in venues, conversations that might otherwise be intolerant to a more direct kind of communication or literal verbal written dialogue. Sound can give us power if we occupy different intersections of marginalization, like to communicate the fullness of our experience, even if we were literally in environments that will not allow us to speak it. I think this is also informed by disabled modes of communication. Nonverbal communication in particular is of interest to me. I’ve learned a lot about communication from people who use speech differently than me, or do not use speech. I think for a while I have understood there to be urgency in this question of queer sound. As my main job, I don’t even work as a producer, or really in the narrative or verbal side of things. I don’t write for radio or research and pitch stories for the most part. My role in project teams, in the professional commercial audio sphere, is in this really unseen background of post-production. I have to find power in that role to inject my values, beliefs, and experiences—and in some ways course-correct stories that are being told in ways that erase or don’t acknowledge perspectives of marginalized groups. I think there is very real urgency to the question of what makes something sound queer, and naming it on the internet, and having a public forum or discussion about it…it’s a teaching tool for other radio makers who are struggling to communicate queerness in a story that needs it. And to make space for queer voices where they should be…

We’ve both made stuff for BBC 4’s Short Cuts, which is thankfully a very open and experimental program. But that show also airs on the BBC, which is, you know, not necessarily an institution that I trust to represent queer voices. However, because it’s on terrestrial radio, alongside the weather report and news, it can reach people in their cars on their way to work. I think there’s power in injecting queer sound into those literal spaces: to be an accidental interruption in someone’s day who may not interact with queer people or queer perspectives feels important to me. That is easier to do in sound in some ways than it is to do with other types of media that would require more deliberate access. Sound can infiltrate and move in ways that are unexpected or accidental, or even passive, and reach people who may or may not engage with queer people or issues.

Charles:

Thank you both for this conversation. I agree that part of the urgency is this need to make room for ourselves and to put ourselves out there, which is a very vulnerable thing to do. Vulnerability and queerness often go hand in hand along with the anxieties, and not only the internal fears but the external risks that come with being out and with talking about those experiences. Especially when we have “Don’t Say Gay” bills, and the queer/trans youths whose lives and identities are being mediated in these public debates. The “concerns” about trans kids that are being meted out on television, social media, documentaries, newspapers, and in the classroom. In this environment, the ability to maintain a queer presence through sound, without saying the word “gay,” is important. There are ways to cultivate that mode of communication as a strategy of care for other queer people, whether or not they are out, or even aware of their own queerness. Leaving those trails or breadcrumbs is a really crucial strategy at this moment, when simply talking about being queer is not only being politicized, but in some cases criminalized.

JT:

I’m just really thinking a lot about the discussion around queerness being criminalized, and personal aspects of queer people who feel rejected by their family. Queer folk who may not be able to be public about their queerness. For some folks, all they can have is a little nudge, a little wink that they can give, and that’s all that they can do. I really think that it’s special that the conversation was put on the record, even into something as ephemeral as a tweet. It can provide strategies for people to inject these gestures, to use your term, Ariana, as a type of audio flagging for each other.

Ariana:

Yes!

JT:

That’s all that some folks can do. I feel like I can really only be like my real kind of queer self online still, and not in other certain spaces. But in my art, I can really let that go. I know that there are people just like me in that situation.

Ariana:

Yeah. I’ve been thinking about what sound is for and what the real utility of sound could be, especially around issues that feel urgent. In this time, right now, queer and trans issues are issues of life and death. They always have been in different cycles of humanity and history. But, we are living in a moment where it feels really palpable. We’re saturated with the impact of it because of the way that media works and travels today. I have been thinking about protest and the demand for bodies in space as protest. That’s not always possible for people whose identities have to be kind of invisible. I’m thinking about this from a disability perspective, too. People who just literally cannot put their bodies in some physical spaces. I think sound is an extremely powerful way around that, and we can actually fill entire spaces without being there physically, without touching them, without putting people who are vulnerable at risk of harm. We can bring their voices into space, and that’s something that I have larger goals and dreams around. Especially the collaborative and collective ability to use sound to build this cacophony, this chorus, this multitude of perspectives and voices. You can have an avalanche, a flood, a trickle, you can have an unending—you know, voicemails on a senator’s phone. You can keep calling and calling and calling to leave an endless barrage of queer voices. You can have a speaker play in public space 24/7, and just don’t shut up ever, and no one’s there to man it, and no one can be pegged to it. These are ways that I imagine sound can move us and help us travel and participate in protests when our bodies can’t be in physical spaces.

Charles:

Thank you both for this conversation.

2.

See Whitney (Whit) Pow, “A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors,” Feminist Media Histories 7, no. 1: 197–230.