In this performative presentation, I spoke around and through the “pitch-shift” effect and explored its use in Wet Mess’ TESTO (2025), as well as its history as a gender-messing device within popular culture (from Funkadelic and Prince to Sophie and Arca) and performance. The pitch-shift effect was an interface for live and recorded voice that allowed users to alter the perceived pitch of a voice. It allowed a voice to move between (inter-face) pitches associated with the binary genders of male and female but also opened up vocal spaces beyond this gender binary (trans-face).

Listening into Wet Mess’ show TESTO (presented at Battersea Arts Centre in 2025 with sound design by Baby), I proposed pitch-shifting as a tool for auditioning possible worlds of gender identity, which afforded some trans* people a means of echolocating-in-resonance with other sonorities, other bodies, and other ontologies. I placed the pitch shift within a broader conceptual framework I termed trans*audition*, which lingered in the affective and phenomenological spaces of sound and listening within trans*-led and trans*-adjacent theatre and performance. Trans*audition* amplified calls from scholars such as Rachel Hann for a deeper inquiry into “performing transness” (Hann, 2024) beyond notions of memoir and trauma.

This performance lecture also drew on diverse scholarship on trans voice, which included discussions of therapeutic and surgical interventions aimed at easing gender dysphoria (Kim 2020; Schwarz, Cielo, Spritzer et al. 2023), explorations of the intersectionality of gender-affirming voice care (Butcher & Vastine 2023; Allphin 2024), and critiques of voice apps that claimed to help trans people train their voices towards a particular ideal (Ahmed, Kim, Hoffman 2022).