ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a reflection about women sound artists who use technology and their own voices, discussing how they develop relationships between the use of all these tools. Historically, women’s voices have been compared with all that is nonintellectual and related to the body and the feelings, to sexual temptation and seduction. Women’s voices are also related to the tradition of singing, which has been an accepted place for the female musical practice, far from composition or the use of technologies, which have been related to a supposed normative male universe where women have always been less considered.
The four sound artists that I analyse here are Brazilian women, active in Brazil and in other countries, who are involved in feminist networks and artivisms, and who create and perform their own music using voice (singing, spoken words, abstract sounds or modified voice) as an important element in their sound creation. They are: Bartira, Bella, Sannanda Acácia and Andrea May. I consider the activity of these sound artists as a way of challenging historical and contemporary cultural assumptions about both women’s voices and the normative male in sound arts practice.
