14 - The Star-Eaters: A 2019 Survey of Female and Gender-Non-Conforming Individuals Using Electronics for Music

Summary

Moving forward to the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Chapter 14 provides a survey of contemporary female and gender-non-conforming artists using electronics for music. Margaret Schedel and Flannery Cunningham highlight how greater access to affordable means to manipulate digital sound from the autonomy of personal computers – away from difficult-to-access studios staffed by technicians and equipped with complex technology, which were previously largely the domain of male ‘experts’ – has opened up electronic music to a wider demographic of people (in terms of gender, race, and class). Taking an ethnographic approach which draws upon questionnaire material from twenty-four respondents variously identifying as composers, sound artists, instruments builders, and programmers, this chapter explores some of this diversity through the artists’ own words.