Heya. Performing Agency: women, networks and experimental music and sound in Cairo, Tehran, Istanbul and Beirut

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This project will explore connections between experimental music practices with political and social agency for Middle Eastern female experimental music artists. Heya is a practice-based research project that uses collaborative methods to balance roles between researcher and subjects, and nonverbal communication inherent in musical composition provide an exchange of experience and knowledge not accessed by traditional research methods. Feminist musicologists exploring subjects like gender and noise and feminist performance, are almost exclusively limited to European and American subjects. Heya will investigate the cultural and sociological situation of women composers in the Middle East through composition, performance and community building. Tara Rodgers' approach to feminist music discourse has sought to negate "the reproduction of an existing cultural order". The language of computer culture (and therefor music production) continues to be embedded with words such as "'master' and 'slave', 'controller', 'command', 'trigger' and 'bang'". There simply isn't an existing common language for decolonising electronic and experimental music in any real way. This lack of meaningful language has meant that feminist musicology and ethnomusicology and scholars of Arab modernism have mostly failed to merge to yield ontologies from experiences of women outside of the West who engage music practices.Modernism and the 'avant garde' in the ME are often indistinguishable from political agency in the region. Existing online networks, readily accessed throughout the Middle East, expedite the transmission of music creating a transnational solidarity across the region. These networks stimulate an interest in 'alternative' musical forms (Anderson 2006, 57). Esoteric, experimental, noise and metal produced and distributed over the web (particularly on Youtube) or played live, either publicly or underground, are acts of "rebellion" and "activism" positioned against popular culture (and hegemony) or deterritorialization of institutional "milieus". Contemporary interdisciplinary discourse within ME women's studies is evolving and interdisciplinary. An understanding of relationships between gender, revolution and state building within the diverse social and political contexts since the Arab Spring and Iranian Green Movement (Persian Spring) in these predominantly Muslim countries (Egypt, Iran and Lebanon), will form an integral basis from which the collaborative work will be done. The revolutionary movements and responses by those in power in 2019 will have a significant impact on female artists in those regions and therefore on this research.This project will explore developing a new decolonised descriptive language for electronic and experimental music composition which will in turn inform this project and discourse in the field and beyond. This matters and is theoretically significant because the language and methods used will generate essential (currently absent) knowledge in musicology, ME women's studies and music culture more broadly including the language of electronic music production. The project will add to the limited number of comparative studies of women in the ME, bring to light the effects of modernism and globalisation on gender roles in the ME, and make a significant contribution to knowledge about women in the ME and their relationship with technology and global networks. The academic audience for Heya includes practice based researchers, ethnomusicologists, musicologists.Musical projects emerging from the ME such as Egyptian Female Experimental Music, Parallel Persia and Experimental Music from Iranian have already attracted attention in European media. Heya will be of interest to a very broad audience through platforms such as CTM Berlin, Mutek, NTS Radio, Resident Advisor, The Wire, The Guardian and Quietus, which have all featured similar projects, though often with a predominantly male artist bias.