Modulating Perception: Noise and Gender in Paulus van Horne's Media Art

By Madeleine Boyson

Topographies of Artificial Desire, Paulus van Horne and Andy DiLallo, image courtesy of the artist

“We are shaped by the sounds we hear,” writes John Schofield in the sound and music issue of World Archaeology. [1] Timothy Darvill argues in the same journal that humans use modern songs to make meaning in our lives. [2] As this and other research shows, we consciously and unconsciously engage with noise and music (two indistinct categories that blur) to encode auditory material into our personal and collective histories, our geographies, and our world.

But for media artist Paulus van Horne (they/them), sound is not only a method for codifying cultural norms, but also the means for destabilizing them. The artist’s broad output—which incorporates composition, synthetic voices, machine learning, game design, and sound production, often combined in large-scale audiovisual installations—allows them to explore how we perceive social constructions like gender. Through “slightly off-putting encounters that destabilize otherwise naturalized (and thus invisible) ways of interacting,” van Horne uses sound to modulate viewer bias, encouraging us to meet each other and technology in ever more honest and intimate ways. [3]

It all begins with audio, which is “an integral part of my work,” writes van Horne in response to my questions in March 2024. “I think it started with my undergraduate degree…[in] ‘Technology in Music and Related Arts (TIMARA)’ at Oberlin College and Conservatory [in Ohio],” a program that combines traditional music with electroacoustic expression. While in school, van Horne started generating and arranging “sonic environments” as a producer for WOBC FM, Oberlin’s student-run radio station.

There van Horne also considered sound’s contextual and cultural resonances. Inspired by experimental/noise musician Aaron Dilloway, van Horne observed the contradictions between refined (if staid) contemporary music atmospheres and unrestrained house concerts: “While at Oberlin, I had begun to wonder, ‘what do we mean when we call something (or someone) “noisy”?’...I was playing small basement shows off campus, screaming into microphones and abusing audio equipment. And at the same [time] I was mixing live concerts at our college’s music venue, trying to make things sound as pristine as possible.”

This dualism is evident in van Horne’s audio compositions (available on bandcamp), which cohere audio clips in binaural soundscapes. Girls and Performance Perfected (both 2023), for example, sample sources from the last hundred years, including bagpipe folk tunes, Britney Spears pop songs, George Gershwin symphonies, and the voice of Dora the Explorer—all of which greet listeners differently based on their personal histories.

Image of the artist, courtesy of the ATLAS Institute at CU Boulder

Van Horne’s compositions are panoramic, dissonant, and hypnotic, even reminiscent of ASMR YouTube videos that mimic music playing in another room. [4] In all, however, the artist acclimates listeners to familiar sounds in new patterns, a process that illustrates “cultural adaptivity—the selective socially meaningful adjustments and alterations necessary to make something suit a new purpose under changed conditions.” [5]

By subverting expectations and blurring arbitrary boundaries between sounds, van Horne leans into what they call “the illegibility of noise,” which creates room to explore dissonance alongside harmony. The artist came out as trans and nonbinary while at Oberlin, noting that the “friction” caused by sound’s ambiguities also echoed in their life during that period, and themes of noise and gender have persisted in their art and research ever since.

Van Horne is now a PhD candidate in the Department of Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado, a program that explores electronic and audio-visual media, cross-platform media production, and time-based media arts practice. There the artist researches “the gender of computer voices” and possible design alternatives for computerized vocalizers alongside gender simulation and trans studies.

Alongside this research, modulated and gender-ambiguous voices can be found in much of van Horne’s work. The “slightly malfunctioning virtual friend” of Topographies of Artificial Desire (2023), a collaboration with Andy DiLallo, invites viewers into conversation with an unbodied artificial intelligence (AI) model trained on love letters and audience input. The installation communicates through a speech synthesizer and questions our relationship with technology, guiding participants through a game-like dreamscape that disappears if participants stop typing and threatens unhinged responses to banal questions.

Similarly, the guide’s voice from pink-hued As You Sleep: Quit Smoking (2023) assumes varying tones in a generic Irish lilt. As Topographies collaborator DiLallo notes, the AI chatbots in van Horne’s installations gain “a voice implying an unseen physical presence” via synthesizer, taking on the role of “a (dis)embodied telepresence or perhaps as a distant friend.” [6]

In both works—as in Oracle (2022, in collaboration with Ian Hatcher) a 360-degree artwork that incorporates “projection mapping, faux-computer speech, and electronic sound manipulation”—humor attends unpredictability as noise accompanies speech. The result is a heady mix of intimate and volatile presences that challenge how we interact with technology and each other.

For van Horne, “sound is the quickest way to immersion” and “really defines what it means to be in a place.” As Schofield and Darvill argue, this place-making is essential to audio’s influence on our normative beliefs. Whatever we bring into a van Horne installation is not necessarily what we’ll bring out of it, and that’s precisely what the artist wants. Artmaking is van Horne’s way of approaching complex questions without clear cut answers and their hope is, they tell me, that a viewer’s “slight confusion will lead to a change in their future encounters with this strange and (always already) technologically-mediated world we live in.”

As You Sleep: Quit Smoking, image courtesy of the artist

Oracle, Paulus van Horne and Ian Hatcher, image courtesy of the ATLAS Institute at CU Boulder

Madeleine Boyson (she/her) is a Denver-based writer, poet, and artist. She holds a BA in Art History and History from the University of Denver and makes her living as a communications and editorial coordinator, creative director, and arts writer.

[1] John Schofield, “The archaeology of sound and music,” World Archaeology 46, no. 3 (August 2014): 290, https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy2.library.colostate.edu/stable/26160226.

[2] Timothy Darvill, “Rock and soul: humanizing heritage, memorializing music and producing places,” World Archaeology 46, no. 3 (August 2014): 462-476. https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy2.library.colostate.edu/stable/26160238?searchText=&searchUri=&ab_segments=&searchKey=&refreqid=fastly-default%3A6348547679679739cb413fce258713e9&seq=1.

[3] From an unpublished interview with the artist. Unless otherwise credited, all other quotes come from this interview between the artist and author in March 2024.

[4] ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) references the sensation people receive when watching or listening to specific kinds of non-sexual stimulating material.

[5] Darvill, “Rock and Soul,” 464.

[6] Andy DiLallo, “Topographies of Artificial Desire,” https://andydilallo.com/topographiesofartificialdesire/.