Modulation & the Chaos-Trans Voice

“The world is fucked, our favorite songs are soundcloud rips of leaked Playboi Carti tracks played through iphone speakers. We’re a generation who, in the wise words of producer Iglooghost, have ‘no time for chill vibes.’”

-Umru (producer Charli XCX, Dorian Electra, Laura Les)

“So this is how the decade ends”

…reads a top YouTube comment on 100 gecs’ live adult swim performance of “800db cloud.” In this video, Laura Les & Dylan Brady, donning a particle mask & wizard hat, autotune-scream their wildly distorted, internet-famous quasi-memecore track in front of a plastic christmas tree while poorly green-screened into a fish tank—made complete by a PBS-style call-to-donate info-concert banner slapped across screen. For young people, especially queer those of us in the queer community, the 2010s have been one long, collective question of “should I be laughing or sobbing?” This performance so perfectly sums up that slippery internal conflict, and it’s why, of all the possible videos on the internet, I’ve chosen this one to set the proverbial “stage.” It is art made by complete nerds with no expressed purpose except self-expression, with no intent of mass-appeal, that manages to incidentally impart a ton of social meaning¹ and garner huge critical & public appeal.²

The last decade has been a particularly public and tangled clusterfuck of terror & beauty for trans artists. As we’ve witnessed a hxstoric rise in pop culture “visibility” we’ve simultaneously experienced rapidly increasing rates of recorded violence against us³—especially in communities of color. In music, more and more trans voices are working their way up the algorithmic charts, and the sounds of these voices are at the forefront of sonic experimentation. The modern practice “queering”—which I define as tearing something to pieces and haphazardly smashing back together in new forms—is the core force now driving the evolution of “genderless” modern vocal performance. The collision of disposable internet pop culture with digital transness & the DIY praxis of “queering” gave birth to what I, alongside some fellow musicians and theorists, like to refer to as “Chaos-Trans” aesthetic. Throughout this piece, I hope to explore the modulation techniques that have been critical in realizing this globalized “scene,” the hxstorical roots that gave rise to it, and the experiences of artists currently driving its rapid progression. I’ll be pulling from existing scholarship, my own experience, as well as a series of interviews I did online with some fantastic trans & nonbinary artists in the space (and technically one cis producer who works closely in the same sphere).

My love affair with 100 gecs began earlier in the year, when I stumbled across a Laura Les (aka osno1) DJ set called “laura les drops HEAVY BIRTHDAY BASS” in which she drops a prolific remix of the Vine “sausage song.” I went on to hear her beautiful original “How to Dress as Human” which punched me right in my trans-dysphoria-feels, discussing all the dyshopric nightmares of just putting clothes on every day, and from then on, I was obsessed. Ever since, I’ve tried to understand why Laura Les, of all people, stands out so significantly to me—and the core reason is in her ability to synthesize, alongside Dylan Brady, such a long and complex hxstory of vocal modulation into the thesis of gendered performance that is 100 gecs. And moreso, it’s in her apparent ability to surpass vocally “passing” and achieve something far more expansive & evolved than a human voice. Her success in this is proven by the sheer amount of pitched-down versions of hers songs that people have uploaded out of sheer confusion, desperately trying to get a handle on what exactly she even is.

But to understand Laura Les & her many incredible contemporaries, we need to go back few decades and inspect the hxstory that led us to this point. I hope to provide context as to how these artists not only came into their voices, but how the general public was made ready to hear and appreciate them. This hxstory is extremely complex & layered, and deserves multiple books worth of information—but I’m going to do my best to give a quick overview of the technology and techniques that drove developments in gendered vocalization.

Original Exploratory Video

The following was created as an initial exploration into this topic prior to writing the piece. It focused on picking apart what the label of “female vocalist” meant throughout the hxstory of modern pop music. While I’d like to change a lot of it, this still serves as a solid primer piece and a chance to listen/see some of the examples discussed. While I’ll be summarizing for the sake of brevity in this background section, if you’d like more depth on the subject, you can stream it here:

Tech(nique) in Pursuit of Realness

I’d like to start in the 40s for the sake of focus, but it would be a mistake not to give a background on the critical hxstory of vocalists, predominantly black women, bending gendered expectations from opera to blues from Marian Anderson to Billy Holiday to Aretha Franklin—who’s ranges and tonalities mark major shifts in pop’s tolerance for non-traditional performance. But that deserves an entire other article, and even better, there’s an entire book on the subject called The Race of Sound Nina Sun Eidsheim wrote that you can dive into.⁴

Alongside their careers, specifically throughout the 1940s & 50s, a multitude of audio technologies were developing—first spurring from a military project involving sending encrypted audio during World War 2, then to the Bell Labs project to make phone calls more efficient over transatlantic cables: the Vocoder.⁵ It took audio, encoded it to a series of binary bits, sent it over a wire, and then translated it back into sounds. This tech found its way into music with artists like Alvino Rey, who was famous for his “talking guitar”, which involved a throat microphone running through a slide guitar into an early vocoder (later used by Pete Drake, as well). This same tech evolved into the “talkbox” made famous by artists like Stevie Wonder and George Clinton in the 60s and 70s.

Here’s where these definitions start to get unstable though, because artists like Sylvester and Jackie Shane show up. So one day you’re hearing Stevie Wonder sound like a robot, and the next you’re hearing what sounds like maybe a woman, or maybe a queen, or something with a falsetto? But it’s definitely femme-inine in some capacity…Sylvester is one of the earliest to take a really strategic approach to his “femme” performance is the form of employing female-assigned vocalists to back him and misdirect the audience’s perceptions. His backing vocalists, who you know as the duo Two Tons of Fun, who gave us “It’s Raining Men,” complicate his performances immensely by mixing the vocal sounds into a wall of sonic gender confusion.⁶ And even before Sylvester, in the 1960s Jackie Shane was totally mystifying audiences with their apparent transness (long before “transness” was even remotely considered a thing) by appearing and sounding as a “real woman” while simultaneously releasing records singing about dating them (with artful lyrical usages of the word “gay” I might add) while wearing a tuxedo. The level of androgyny starting to hid the airwaves was seriously throwing people off.

And as we move into the 1980s, the vocoder becomes increasingly easy to acquire, and artists like Laurie Anderson and Devo start filling the airwaves with more confusion. Is that a robot, is it a lady, what’s up with those weird hats? People don’t know. I believe this shift towards the gender-neutral vocoder voice goes hand in hand with the women’s punk movements at the time and the rise of metal and hardcore in the 80s—which involved womxn screaming in very traditionally “unladylike” tones. The vocoder offered a way to enter the neutral zone of this genderless robotic voice.

The robotic obsession of the 80s pushed development of vocal tools progressively further, until falling out of favor stylistically with the hyped-up invention of what would be known as “Autotune.” This new tool utilized the same technology of encoding the voice, but maintained the original vocal performance and structure instead of making it sound fully robotic. The first time most people heard this very clearly was in 1998, with Cher’s “Believe”. This was a critical moment because it showed that these modulation technologies could integrate more dynamically than as just an effect, they could work alongside the natural intonations of the vocalists.

So bring on the pop stars, Britney Spears and the Spice Girls and Cascada are living on Autotune, using it more subtly than Cher to re-establish “the female voice” as a pristine sound—intentionally hiding the autotune. It’s intentionally hiding the autotune, unlike Cher’s, and this sound becomes the defining vocal tone of the 2000s. Which is interesting because it goes from the androgynous robot voice back to this clear goal of creating the “perfect” female voice.

But this gets totally blown apart again when T-Pain and Kanye West got a hold of autotune in the mid 2000s, it took things back to the land of the vocoder, in which vocals were intentionally meant to sound inhuman (T-Pain in no way needs autotune to be pitch-perfect). At the same time the sped-up sampling sound of “chipmunk soul” is getting popularized in hip hop, creating a tolerance for these strange vocal sounds. Artists like Bon Iver and Francis and the Lights build harmonizers that combine the concepts of autotune and vocoders into incredibly powerful sonic engines, and these sounds start spreading fast. Building off the high-pitched emo-sounding pop voices that had been populating the charts for years like My Chemical Romance, Panic! at the Disco, and Sonny Moore (who would later be known as Skrillex). On the electronic side increasingly uses of sampled vocals by EDM and bounce artists like Big Freedia start to push conceptions of what a “lead vocalist” even needs to do in a pop song—going further away from traditional vocalization. Vocals are treated more and more like instruments and less like lyrical delivery tools. And altogether this landscape of me & women (gender neutral language was honestly still not in wide play back in the early 2010’s) modulating vocals with pitch & speed bending, harmonizers that reach inhuman ranges, and even using samples not even personally recorded. This built not just a popular acceptance of the sounds but a real public interest in the new sonic possibilities.

Autotune & harmonizer combination became the go-to for trap artists’ vocals because it lends itself so well to the mumble-rap style. And so in the 2010s womxn artists in the 2010s like Charli XCX break back away from the “effortless” polished sound they’d been told they needed to succeed in the pop world, and embrace this inhuman tech-sound. Artists like Fever Ray and Dorian Electra, who have naturally higher pitched voices, start employing the reverse, and using pitch shifters and intentional physical techniques to drop them & their backing vocalists sounds. Interestingly in the case of Dorian Electra though, “…their ‘formant shift” sounding vocals are just their mouth.” says Umru Rothenberg. One example I distinctly remember of digital shifting though was Shamir at Pitchfork festival in 2016. Shamir Bailey has a very high-pitched voice and as part of the genderplay in their set, utilized a full octave shifter to drop their femme backing vocalist’s sound to a more comparatively “masculine” tone to further the sonic confusion. And this seems to mirror the neutralizing effect of the vocoder, in that the performances become less gendered once they enter this modulated sphere. We start to hear men in rap music start sounding almost like female pop stars, with a great example being in Frank Oceans’ “Nikes”.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in this time of overlap we start to see more trap artists queering the genre like Young Thug & Lil Uzi vert. Lil Uzi Vert has literally been told he dresses like Avril Lavigne and its lots of higher vocal notes via autotune, and Young Thug who was dressed fully androgynously in the Jeffrey album artwork and is known for regularly wearing femme clothing & designer dresses.⁷ I remember this particular TikTok that’s supposed to jokingly show how Young Thug recorded his verse on “The London” and I think it’s pretty telling. Basically the creator, pretending to be Young Thug, gets hit in the testicles right as his first starts, and that is supposed to be why his vocals are so high pitched in the song. It’s basically connecting his emasculation directly to his femme-inized voice and points to the confusion these kinds of performances, driven by technology, create amongst audiences.

Interestingly, large players in music industry like Pharrell suggested that culturally we are all sort of feminizing as we progress—which he sees as a super positive thing. And yet despite this concept, large inconsistencies still remain. As Umru Rothenberg points out “…there’s so much popular music currently that’s also hyper masculine, and male abusers—Sheck Wes, 6ix9ine, Chris Brown—seem to constantly be on top of the charts despite their crimes being common knowledge.” He goes on to also clarifying an important distinction between “feminizing” and “softness” that can be conflated when discussing shifts in cultural tone. “There’s also a lot of ‘feminine’ music that’s the opposite of ‘soft’—Tik Tok viral tracks like Ashnikko’s STUPID or artists like Rico Nasty or Megan Thee Stallion…it’s hard to make such broad generalizations in a time when popular music moves so quickly.“

The overall field of who can manipulate their voice and who will be accepted for adopting less rigid gendered aesthetics is slowly widening. And alongside this we see increasingly more accessible technology develop to take voices, tune them, shape them, generate harmonies around them—even synthesize them from scratch in the case of Plogue’s “Aria Engine”—and it can all be done via a laptop. I’d direct you specifically to Marie Ork, one of the “vocalists” available on the Alter-Ego engine, who can go everywhere from clean pop to screamo-metal. “Vocaloid” singers (named from the Yamaha Software) created in CGI and synthesis, like Miku Hatsune, even have full live performances via holograms. In 2015 Oneohtrix Point Never actually released “Garden of Delete” which famously used a vast amount of synthesized vocals, as well, which was many’s first exposure to this technology (aside from the Google translate pronunciation voice). A particularly important part of this synthesis also involves acknowledging the “voices” of those with different bodies & abilities. As Ellie Kim eloquently puts it: “As an able-bodied individual, voice modulation is an augmentation, or accessory, to my regular communication. For other people, digital voice production may be their main means of communication. In that sense, of course, their “digital voice” is an authentic representation of themselves and would not necessarily be distinct.” Figures like Stephen Hawking come to mind in the sense of exemplifying a more complex idea of “vocal” performance. In this sense the idea of vocal “synthesis” holds a much more complex hxstory than simply the creation modern Vocaloid software.

But alongside these synthesis tools, the internet has flooded with offshoots of modulation technology—not simply made for musicians. Audio filters on social media like Snapchat and TikTok allow for pitch-modulated sounds and harmonizers to become normally accessible sounds to anybody with a smartphone. Specifically I find autotune & harmonized videos of animals to be the most fascinating, because they many times sound pretty close to modern tracks. Some of the less intelligible verses of 100 gecs songs and mumble-rap tracks get honestly pretty close to some of the whales and dogs we see in these videos. Laura Les literally even samples pitched dog barking noises across tons of her tracks. Another byproduct of this shifting, “Nightcore,” (aka sped-up & pitched-up tracks) also get uploaded all over youtube as editing software gets easier to use. At this point when user don’t even need editing software experience to modulate vocals, things just go off the rails.

With all this tech now at mass disposal, modern queer & trans artists start producing vocal performances that capture interest at rapid rates—and one launches all the way to a grammy nomination in the case of Sophie. And this is critical because it represents the first example of a really widely accepted and well-received usage of some of the most intensely weird vocal modulations that even exist. Throughout her career she’d worked with huge acts like Madonna, and after this release she starts working with Lady Gaga—it’s a big deal. The vocals she produces are new altogether—especially for a trans artist. They’re not quite robotic, they’re not quite natural, they’re somewhere in between and really unique. She also uses a similar technique to Sylvester’s backing vocalists, in employing Cecile Believe, a female-assigned vocalist, to perform on her album and effectively throw off the listener’s gender perceptions of where Sophie begins and ends. Forget robot or not like the vocoder, at this point the listener literally has no idea who or what Sophie is. It’s so confusing that people even accuse Sophie of “appropriating” the female voice. Sophie, to many, represents a major milestone in the long line of modulators and benders that set the stage for her kind of music to really take hold like it has today. The modern world of trans womxn’s vocal expression is the product of decades of performance and tech developments alongside cultural shifts that have allowed for their voices to just sort of work in music—and sound somehow familiar to people despite being new, and to some people, scary. This is a big moment for trans women in music, because people are starting to really question what a “woman” sounds like. And people are starting to wonder if all these labels they were throwing around about “female vocalist” might be wrong—and if they even really matter anymore at all.

Queering: A Deconstruction of Content

With all these exciting musical developments, and the ideas of “deconstructed club” music has grown in popularity alongside the “Hyper Pop” or “Chaos” genres, with producers like Bored Lord and Ariel Zetina flooding the internet with club-focused repurposings of strange reclamations like 90’s Nu-Metal. This specifically points to a myriad of “queering”/repurposing/reclamation projects in the trans music world, especially in formerly masculine-dominated genres. Erin Corbett calls this a project of “…de-masculating ‘aggressive’ music,” who invokes 100 gecs again saying artists like them “…take pop-punk and late 2000s dubstep (both very bro-y in their original forms) & turn it into something very queer, much less self-serious, & still really fun.” Continuing to say that “a lot of that heavy stuff that was huge was incredibly misogynistic and aggressively male (thinking of nu-metal in general, but the indie rock that followed it was also full of toxic male bullshit.)”

From Devi McCallion’s Instagram 9/24/19.

And in those “heavier” spaces, artists like Dreamcrusher and Black Dresses make a name on the noisier-side of this “chaos-trans” scene as well. This scene is particularly interesting to me because it represents another large zone of conflict with hxstorically hyper-masculine performance. Noise and industrial music has a complex lineage, but I think this meme from Devi McCallion of Black Dresses really sums up the current situation best. It shows one, what appears to be a humanoid My Little Pony, blocking another scared humanoid-pony from passing. The blocking pony reads “trans/disabled/black/n8v industrial artists” and the pony being blocked says “straight all male industrial band from LA.” As Jill Lloyd Flanagan of Forced into Femininity says “…it does seem that a lot of us came out of the noise scene but felt, because of the misogyny, to create sonic and performative distance from that world was a good idea.” There has been a long & committed project to distance queer forms of noise & industrial music from this large contingent of the scenes.

Activity in the less-nosey sphere of things (but certainly no less jarring or intense) has been lead by artists like Katie Dey, ANOHNI, and Arca. And there’s a common thread across such a large amount of all this music: it’s made by trans womxn. And I think of it’s because of this critical technique of “queering” that makes music like this possible. In “queering” the voice—you’re tearing it up until it’s unrecognizable, and then putting it back together into this strange sound via new accessible technologies. Ellie Kim of Superknova defines it as “…taking existing constructs and morphing or destroying them entirely to make new, beautiful and exciting things.“ Many also see it as a method for essentially re-positioning oneself to more critically consider how a subject fits into societal intersections. The official dictionary definition of “queer” when used as a verb is actually “to spoil; ruin.” So in this curated mess of noise and modulation, we see acts sort of “ruining” music in the sense of actually claiming it as their own space.⁸

“We’ve already done that to our identities, and many of us, to our own bodies. Why not art and music?” Ellie brilliantly elaborates. This vocal queering can be an artistic method to counter vocal dysphoria without immense physical re-training and medical procedures or hormones. It can be a godsend for trans vocalists who simply want to hear their own voices in differing gendered, or genderless, contexts. “I think the first thing that comes to mind…is the idea of an escape from dysphoria via self expression and self augmentation…I have a relatively deep voice which makes me dysphoric at times, and vocal modulation could represent a sort of escape via musical process, an expressive musical work that is also personally cathartic for my dysphoric feelings.“ Says Fen Rotstein of FEN. That all being said, it would be a mistake to see all modulation as an explicit attempt to question binaries—it’s the right of an artist to express without intent. Angel Marcloid of Firetoolz explains this, saying that “vocal pitch and formant size has nothing to do with identity unless an artist intends for it to have something to do with identity.” Marcloid sees their art as much visceral, and not at all as some sort of constructed critique, saying “vocal modulation may change concepts of identity for some artists, but I care not 1% about that. None of what I do musically is any kind of statement or criticism or expression of identity. I am a soul and there is a body associated with it. That is really my only identity, if you really wanna call it one.”

Deconstruction of Production Methods

I’d like to quickly discuss the technical side of how some of these vocal tones are created. The word “deconstruction” is used to describe the finished product, but it refers to the process itself, which in the case of these modern “chaotic” songs is sort of done almost in a reverse order compared to more commonly-understood creation. Traditionally, the songwriters writes some chords and lyrics and then finds a way to fit those lyrics to melody & harmonies etc. before recording this in a linear fashion to a track. What makes these other tracks “deconstructions” are that all of these processes are made to be out of order due to the technical possibilities found in modern DAW’s (Digital Audio Workstations). The creator can write a melody, throw some words in, change the chords, re-tune the words or sample and move the order of the words around in each line, speed the entire track up or move lyrics from one song they’re working on into another one and re-tune them—the whole process is incredibly non-linear and largely new due to developing software. So in the case of so many of the artists we’re discussing, the “deconstruction” is not simply in a cultural (re-shaping pop stars and their music etc.) or sonic sense, it’s very much made possible by a specific change in process.

In terms of the actual technologies: formant and pitch modifiers run into Autotune engines provide those sharp inhuman vocal runs. In the case of sounds like 100 gecs, pitch and formant goes up with short note-transition time on the autotune to give a hard-shift effect, while vocals like those found on Sophie’s “Ponyboy,” use pitch and formant shifted down with longer, smoother note-transition times on autotune. These recordings are then most likely modified via granular synthesis to give the “growling” almost Transformer-like sounds of the more wild vocal sections. Or, to achieve this effect, they are re-sampled and warped. “Re-sampling,” the practice of “bouncing” or exporting new sound files with effects on them and then loading them back into editing software (now with the affected audio acting as the “raw” recording, rather than the original clean microphone recording), is one of the most-used methods for getting all sorts of sounds. Artists like Skrillex have been known to re-sample recordings over & over again before ending up with sounds they deem weird enough to work.

To give a quick example from my own experience, in my work on the track THEYDIES, I’ll show the autotune plugin I used alongside some gating, vocal doubling, and pitch shifting via Ableton’s built in warping tools. I’ve provided the original vocal take alongside the affected version. I would say that the original is “embarrassing” but honestly it’s not to me, despite it being in the most traditional sense a horrid performance—and that’s because it gets right to the point of how I wanted the lyrics to be delivered, without allowing questions around melody to disrupt the stream of consciousness.

This Autotuning method acts less like a Cher-esque note correction and more like a meme remix—where vocals are recorded without clear musical intention, to then be given context & melody through the production process. It is a fundamentality different approach to songwriting.

When we look at Laura Les’ progression from remixing Vine audio to essentially remixing her own voice, we see that same idea in play—the vocals are used more like a sampler/synthesizer than as primarily a lyrical delivery tool. DJ’s pulling old 2000s pop samples and acapellas engage in a similar play, where they modulate vocals to become new instruments that they have control over. This concept of repurposing is what drove the THEYDIES music video to explore essentially “Deepfaking” your own image—there’s a queering in these sorts of collage-esque cut and paste methods across-the-board. I personally believe that the expanding market of royalty-free sampling services like Splice has also pushed this into overdrive since they essentially prioritize modulation and repurposing over “original” synthesis. Plus just the speed at which you can search, download, and then drop samples into tracks is something that just didn’t exist before it launched its service with a desktop app.

The changes this sort of workflow has on how vocals develop is truly fascinating, for example Erin Corbett said the following about their process: “When I started to make more electronic music I'd mask the natural timbre of my voice with distortion or reverb or layering and eventually auto-tune, and it was actually through that process that I eventually learned to love my voice. I developed a work-flow that involved auto-tuning a rough take into a melody, then learn how to sing that melody by singing along to the auto-tuned take. The final version would usually be a mixture of auto-tuned and natural. “

“I would like it if my day-to-day speaking voice was more of a refined expression. Not necessarily artistic, but valuable like art.”

— Angel Marcloid (Firetoolz)

What’s Next?

In the case the “scene,” it’s artists’ popularity only seems to be increasing. It’s hard to guess what that means given the volatile state of modern pop music, and the speed at which sounds change via viral services like TikTok and Spotify’s changing algorithmic practices—but the number of trans and nonconforming performers in the public eye are indeed growing. The critical question, to me, will be more around the differing life-experiences of those figures as the specificity of their musical cultures becomes more and more saturated from generations accustomed to more tolerance to gender “deviancy.” It’s difficult to understand how these shifts will affect the musical practices of artists. But, as Umru says, at least for them, “…the goal is to push this sound into popular music rather than exist in some trendy exclusive space…” and I think that’s a very positive way to approach things. But the age-old question remains: what happens to the impact of a subculture when it becomes, well, culture. Only time will tell, but we can look to hxstories like those of punk music to hypothesize—in that case, over time the mentality expanded to represent far more groups and experiences that its original manifestations ever did, which I think acted as an overall positive.

There is so much coverage still to get into here, and I hope to continue this project of archival research and interviewing to build a body of work that can act as a critical tool for understanding this incredible musical & cultural hxstory. From continuing my interviews and chasing down complex sonic lineages, I believe we can vastly improve our understanding of not only the “Chaos” sound but the true “progress” of trans artists in the now hyper-visible world. I aim to create work that trans performers find to be legitimately useful catalogs of their experiences and creative achievements, and I hope this can serve as a long-term project all those involved can feel proud to be a part of—because damn, is there a serious lack of trans music hxstory. And that is messed up, because as Fen states “trans people make the best stuff ;)”

References

Caramanica, J. (2019, October 5). Is 100 gecs the End of Pop, or a New Beginning? The New York Times.
Angell, J. (2019, September 6). The Brilliant Pop Anarchy of 100 gecs. The Fader.
Mcbee, T. P. (2018, October 27). The Problem With the Wrong Kind of Trans Visibility. The New York Times.
Sun, N. (2019, October 17). The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. UCLA Department of Musicology.
Lavey, N., & Kang, J. (2017, August 19). Object of Interest: The Vocoder. The New Yorker.
Peraino, J. A. (2014, December 5). Homomusical Communities. California Scholarship Online.
Street, M. (2018, June 1). Young Thug's 'Jeffery' Cover Complicates Black Masculinity and Challenges Identity Labels. Complex.
Foreman, A. (2015, December 1). Queer As Verb. The Offing Mag.

Max SchafferDecember 9, 2019