Abstract

In December 2015, the Spanish company Babypod in collaboration with the singer and former Eurovision entryist Soraya Arnelas held the first ‘concert for foetuses’. Attended by 10 future parents, the show consisted largely of acoustic pop covers of Christmas songs and carols, transmitted to foetuses using the ‘Babypod’ vaginal speaker. With the tagline ‘music is life’, Babypod claims to stimulate vocalization of babies before birth, helping to develop their communication skills in the womb.

This talk addresses the sonic and gender politics of contemporary pre-natal speaker devices. It will ask what kind of futures, temporalities and ‘listeners’ these technologies seek to produce via (certain forms of) music. Through considering the relations between production and reproduction, I will suggest that these seemingly new uterine sound technologies are shaped by longstanding notions of feminized mediation, audiophilia and fidelity.