Research

Our research is building an open database on gender and music technologies, creating a shared resource for the sector. Current projects include What’s in the Mix, a study of gender in sound engineering and production, and research on electric guitar design, exploring how instruments reflect and reproduce gendered identities.

Sound engineers play a crucial role in shaping the experience of live music, mediating the relationship between performers and audiences through technical expertise and creative judgment. Yet the field remains starkly gendered: women, non-binary, and transgender practitioners are significantly underrepresented, both globally and in Norway, where 98% of sound engineers identify as cisgender men (Balansekunst, 2022). This imbalance reflects wider patterns in technocultures where heteromasculine norms define expertise and marginalise other groups.

This project investigates how targeted initiatives, such as Norway’s GRIP program, seek to address these disparities. GRIP provides women, non-binary, and transgender participants with training, mentoring, and professional experience in authentic live sound settings, while also aiming to shift cultural perceptions of who belongs in technical roles.

Our research focuses on the lived experiences of practitioners who have taken part in GRIP, capturing how they navigate professional pathways, build confidence, and develop a sense of belonging in a male-dominated field. Using feminist narrative methods and in-situ interviews conducted in music venues and rehearsal spaces, the study highlights how place, practice, and identity intersect in shaping participation in live sound work.

By centring the perspectives of women and gender-expansive practitioners, the project contributes to a deeper understanding of both the barriers and opportunities in sound engineering, and reflects on how initiatives like GRIP might foster long-term structural change.

This project explores how electric guitar design in the 21st century has become a critical site for challenging long-standing gendered and racialised norms, historically shaped by white, hetero-masculine ideals of musical legitimacy. It examines two design trajectories: commercially marketed guitars designed specifically for women and girls, and signature guitar models co-designed by women and queer artists.

By analysing design modifications and marketing strategies, the research considers how questions of identity, expertise, and accessibility materialise through instrument design. On one hand, guitars marketed to women and girls—such as Daisy Rock or the Gibson Les Paul Goddess—have introduced ergonomic changes and feminised aesthetics that claim to broaden access but often reinforce stereotypes about gender, playability, and skill. On the other, signature models by artists like St. Vincent, H.E.R., Yvette Young, and Lzzy Hale demonstrate how collaboration between manufacturers and women or queer players can reconfigure ideas of authority, technical expertise, and legitimacy in guitar culture.

The study combines feminist media analysis with a qualitative mapping of guitar technocultures, including effects pedals and amplifiers. Drawing on artist statements, promotional materials, gear demos, trade publications, and online forums, it situates the guitar as a materially active presence—shaping, and shaped by, the bodies and identities that engage it.

Alongside our publications, we are creating sound essays that bring our research to life through listening. These audio pieces connect directly to our projects—What’s in the Mix? and “This Is a Guitar That Didn’t Exist Before”—offering new ways to explore gender, technology, and sound. Each essay combines voices, music, and sonic textures to open up the research process and invite wider audiences to engage with the questions we are asking. The first sound essays will be available via our website in early 2026.