The Spirit of Radio and Authenticity as Lost Cause
Scholarship has its fair share of burdens, alright, and I’d venture to guess that for the philosopher kings of modern academia, experiencing life unencumbered by knowledge of what’s going on underneath the hood is chief among them. When I asked Gender and Performance Studies professor Dr. Ann Pellegrini on this week’s episode with Rita Wilson whether every component of how we operate in the world could be interpreted as performative, she replied: “I don’t mean to sound glib…but it’s performance all the way down.”
If nothing else, her take loosened my grip on the futile pursuit of authenticity in myself and others. But for Ann, I’d imagine that possessing such an in-depth understanding not just of what makes us tick, but how we tick, must require a kind of moment-to-moment recalibration while navigating the field of human relationships.
It was at the intersection of Ann’s gender research and performance studies scholarship that our conversation largely lived this week. “If we think about gender as performance,” she said, “we can think about all the social cues, all the social stereotypes about what it is to be an embodied subject… We’re taught how to do our bodies in a way that accords with the sex ascribed to us at birth.”
In Ann’s framing, because gender can be understood as performative, it is by extension a discipline, a craft we hone through social feedback. “We get rewarded if we do it right,” she said, “and we get chastened, sometimes more harshly than others, if we do it wrong.”
And perhaps as a rebuke to my suspicion that this perspective nullifies any chance at authenticity, Ann added: “That way you have to learn [gender], that we’re trained into it, doesn’t mean it’s false. In fact, it comes to feel very real.”
Our chat deviated quite spectacularly when I asked Ann whether, without the microphones in front of us, our conversation could still be classified as performance. That was the moment she delivered the line: “It’s performance all the way down.” But later, contemplating the instrument capturing our voices for the podcast, she pivoted toward something far more material: the gendered history of broadcast technology itself.
As Ann explained, early radio and recording technologies were designed primarily around lower-frequency male voices. Higher-frequency voices, more commonly associated with women, often lost clarity and definition within the bandwidth limitations of early broadcast systems. Engineers compensated by increasing the volume on women’s voices, but the result could sound brittle, piercing, or distorted. In other words, the technology itself helped cultivate the perception that women’s voices were shrill, emotional, or abrasive.
The science behind all this is a knotty intertwining of sexism, broadcast radio, government regulation, anatomy, and speech. With the proliferation of AM radio in the 1930s, signal interference became increasingly common because one station’s transmission often bled into neighboring frequencies on the dial. Congress responded by allotting fixed bandwidth ranges for broadcasters, most of whom then limited their signals to roughly 300–3400 Hz, what became known as “voiceband,” the minimum amount of information required to transmit speech intelligibly.
Not surprisingly, the largely male engineers and regulators behind these standards primarily optimized the technology around lower male vocal ranges.
A thing about speech: when you measure the frequencies of vowels and consonants, the consonants occupy higher ranges in both male and female voices. So it’s actually a fallacy that women’s voices are inherently less discernible than men’s. In many respects, they’re comparably intelligible to the human ear. But by boosting the volume to compensate for technical shortcomings, broadcasters inadvertently created a harsher listening experience, one that ultimately reinforced cultural perceptions that women sounded overly emotional or even hysterical.
And to this day, perhaps as a means of combating those perceptions, many women lower their voices, sometimes by as much as half an octave, only to then be criticized for sounding unnatural or inauthentic.
Now, it’s often said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so with little more than a 45-minute primer on Gender and Performance scholarship, I’ll weigh in with this half-baked morsel: the confluence of gender bias and performance in recorded media creates a dizzying feedback loop in which authenticity becomes simultaneously overperformed and unrecognizable.
For more on sound, frequency, and acoustics, check out our episode with indie darling Mac DeMarco and acoustician Russ Berger.
