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Low-quality Sonic Snapshots: the Smartphone as Feminised Recording Device

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The following essay is an extract from Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear, published by Silver Press and edited by Irene Revell and Sarah Shin. Published in November 2024, the essay was originally written in 2017.

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The University of Lincoln, where I work, has a railway line running through the middle of its campus. One wintry evening, when I was leaving the office late, I heard the overwhelming and eerie sound of a freight train emergency braking. Without really thinking, I pulled out my smartphone, opened my Voice Memos app and started recording. Since then, I’ve been collecting what I half-seriously referred to as, ‘low-quality sonic snapshots’. Recordings include nesting jackdaws squalling down a chimney, the cacophony of the arcades in Whitby, heavy summertime rain, a fairground organ playing Vengaboys, the drone of gasworks and ‘singing’ railway carriages. The recordings vary in length from a few seconds to a minute and are minimally edited – there is usually little beyond a fade in and out. I’ve ‘exhibited’ some of these recordings as a sound installation as part of an event held at St Mary le Wigford Church, Lincoln. The recordings are also hosted on a SoundCloud page I update from time to time.

The ‘low-quality’ of ‘low-quality sonic snapshots’ is something of a misnomer. The microphones built into current smartphones are often fairly powerful and the recordings are not particularly distorted. That said, ‘low-quality’ marks a distancing from the orthodoxies of field-recording practice. Recordings are mono rather than binaural. They are often spontaneous, and I don’t really attempt to minimise interference from, for example, traffic, wind or the voices of passersby. Nor do I eradicate my own presence as the person holding and directing the recording device. As Jacqueline Waldock has noted, field recordings are often presented as an ‘objective’ snapshot of a live event, with the sounds of the recorder minimised. Conversely, I make no conscious effort to minimise the sounds of my participation in the recording process and the sonic event – on some recordings you can hear the sounds of me moving, breathing and giggling. That said, it’s rarely obvious to others that I am taking sound recordings – it typically appears as if I am stood looking at my phone. This ubiquitous, everyday device – the medium and means of capturing sound – disguises the recording process.

I consider my smartphone to be a feminised recording technology. Recording itself could be understood as a feminised process, given the gendered connotations of receptivity and containment. To refer to the smartphone as a feminised recording device does not only refer to its capacity to capture, contain and replay audio, but also to capture and contain images and videos. Indeed, though foregrounding a different sensory register, I understand listening through these ‘voice memo’ recordings to be vaguely akin to flicking through a phone’s photo gallery – the listener experiences similar overlaps and disjunctures in site, aesthetic and affectivity. Likewise, the apparent speed with which photos are taken, edited and uploaded to various online platforms is mirrored by my approach to the sound recordings.

The smartphone’s status as a feminised technology is perhaps most obviously articulated by the smartphone’s associations with selfie culture. While some have celebrated selfies as empowering and politically useful for (some) women and queer femmes – D.A.K. in Browntourage magazine, for example, has argued that selfies can help to decolonise representations of women of colour and queer people of colour – selfies have also been condemned by cultural conservatives and liberal feminists alike for being a purported manifestation of vanity and narcissism that reduces women to their appearance. In other words, selfies, alongside other feminised smartphone practices such as texting too much, have been considered an expression of bad, weak or unproductive modes of femininity.

Smartphones have also become embedded in some of the affective, administrative and relational labour practices that have historically been performed by women (particularly working-class women and women of colour) and have often been unwaged. As Robin James has argued, femininity as both gender ideal and norm can be understood as a technology that helps women perform these forms of labour: ‘Need to persuade people to do unpleasant things (like get out of bed)? It helps to be cute and/or nurturing! Need to create a clearly legible calendar or schedule that represents a family’s hectic and convoluted schedule? It helps to have neat handwriting, fine motor skills and design sense.’ In recent years, such labour has been redistributed so that masculinised subjects labouring within informational economies have to ‘be their own secretaries’ (and mothers, and carers, and wives . . .). With this, smartphones become an alternative facilitating technology. The smartphone can wake you up; it can provide reminders of meetings and appointments; it can even function as an ‘intelligent personal assistant’.

The smartphone’s automated ‘personal assistant’ often reproduces the gendered connotations of this type of work. Personal assistants are typically imagined to be female – it is a role that has historically been undertaken by women. Likewise, many of the smartphones’ various ‘assistants’ are gendered as female – they are part of a long historical lineage of robotic femininities. In the US, Japan and Germany, among other countries, Apple’s Siri has a feminine voice, as does Windows’ Cortana and numerous other apps for Android systems – for example AIVC (Alice) and Robin, DataBot’s personal assistant. The ‘Assistant’ app for Android pairs a feminine voice with an icon of a white, red-haired, attentive-looking woman holding a clipboard. The app is even capable of performing the affective labour of ‘personality’: one reviewer praises the assistant’s capacity to engage in small talk and jokes.

Technological devices are not ‘gender-neutral’ insofar as they are coproduced with gendered conventions, values and ideals. It is not simply that these technologies reflect pre-existing gender categories. The smartphone, in its facilitation of modes of labour and particular, feminised media practices, such as selfies and texting, both participates in and shapes gendered norms. When the smartphone enters the domain of field recording, its gendered status is not elided. Rather, it participates and shapes gendered expectations in alternative ways. If field recording has often been ‘masculine’ in terms of both participation and its aesthetics, then perhaps the smartphone brings with it an alternative, gendered sound apparatus.

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