Hyperpop, theatre and the trans voice

With a new, posthumous album by SOPHIE on the horizon, the pop-consuming public has her influence on the mind. Beyond hyperpop giant SOPHIE, trans artists – from Wendy Carlos to 100 gecs – have dominated the scene for as long as the computer’s bleep bloops (my term, not an official phrase) could be music.

Irish musician and theatre artist Ois O’Donoghue says that Wendy Carlos played the computer like a violin, eliciting raw and organic sounds from binary zeros and ones. This August, O’Donoghue stakes her own claim in hyperpop with HYPER, Jaxbanded Theatre's play-with-music about a pair of bandmates and besties Saoirse and Conall. When Saoirse comes out and begins transitioning, the band must grapple with her changing body, voice and life. 

O'Donoghue says: "I suppose for me, HYPER is fundamentally about the really complicated relationship trans people often have with our own voices. I think we're in a time where we're being made incredibly visible, and as a result being pressured to speak a lot and speak out a lot, which is an important thing. And I think it's interesting how that meets up with a lot of us, like, physically, fundamentally not loving the sound of our own voices, and how that can kind of mesh with that."

Much of HYPER focuses literally and figuratively on the trans voice. O’Donoghue talks about SOPHIE's use of the vocoder as itself an instrument – not of disguise, but of expression. For trans people, the voice can be a serious site of gender dysphoria. Some of us go through voice training and medical intervention to make sounds that are affirming to us. In cisnormative culture, the “trans voice” is a site of gendered discongruity.

"The show is quite specifically about what it is to be trans in Ireland," O'Donoghue says. "I think the voice is massive in how people think about you, and how people gender you here. It's really interesting, in that I can pass most of the time, until I start speaking, and then everything falls apart, you know? And it's really interesting watching the eye-drop happen there." 

Vocoder and autotune have often come under fire for being 'dishonest', or for being a cheat code for vocalists of less than satisfactory quality. In hyperpop, though, voice editing is just another digital instrument. Through hyperpop and voice editing, the trans artist has the opportunity to create "yourself as you exist in your head," O’Donoghue says. It brings the voice into the immaterial world of the computer’s bleep bloops. 

"There's a lot of inside-ball jokes for trans people," O'Donoghue says of HYPER. "I think about voice training and voice training phrases, and the kind of repetitive, robotic nature of trying to do, like, 'Heat from fire, fire from heat,' and applying that to then the actual electronics we often put our voices through… So I think, for me… it's breaking down gender barriers, while also allowing you to enact yourself in a kind of magical way, which is wonderful. But I think the show is also about kind of coming to feel like you can enact yourself in that way without the electronics. Sometimes, it's about trying to marry those two worlds in your head. It's not about disguising yourself. It's about trying to be, like, 'No, this isn't a thing with me. This is a thing with how you're perceiving me.'"

In HYPER, the role of Saoirse is shared between O’Donoghue and cis actor Fiona Larmon. O’Donoghue says that this casting innovation was born out of a desire to shield the trans body from the (re-)enactment of violence against it. "There are elements of the story where I was like, 'I would like to discuss some of the darker things that happen as a result of the voice,' but also I don't want to enact them upon my own body, but also and upon trans bodies, because I don't like that that's how we exist in media culture… If I can put a cis body here, we can point out how both absurd it is that this happens, but also we can point out that, like, 'This is the only way I see you.' I think it's more evident, then," she says. Larmon’s presence in O’Donoghue’s place for those darker moments not only diverges from the trope of the trans body as nothing but an object of tragedy, but it also highlights the absurdity of transphobia; it forces us as the audience to confront what it is that we see as different between trans and cis women. 

HYPER touches on a panoply of topical things, but more than anything, it depicts a deep and changing friendship. "I suppose I always think of bands as expressing a togetherness in a really visceral way. In saying that we're a band, we're saying that we're besties… I think it's complicated, because when you're in the band, [music] then becomes the point of expression of your friendship. It's like, where are we right now? What does that mean? That's what you're saying through your tunes."

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HYPER, Summerhall (Former Women’s Locker Room), 1-26 Aug, 8.15pm, £10-17