Please join us for the Sonic Architectures series hosted by the Royal College of Art School of Architecture. As part of the series, Gascia Ouzounian and Mhamad Safa will present a joint conversation on ‘Counterlistening’ (details below).

December 12, 6.30-8 PM Lecture Theatre 1, Darwin Building, Kensington Campus.

To register, please visit the RCA School of Architecture site.

In this talk, interdisciplinary researchers Mhamad Safa (Royal College of Art) and Gascia Ouzounian (University of Oxford) discuss different approaches to ‘counterlistening’: listening against official and hegemonic narratives of contested events, including in the contexts of war and genocide; and listening for sounds and voices that have been occluded and erased, particularly in the aftermath of mass violence. They discuss different approaches to listening as a tactics and mode of resistance in their own work and others, drawing attention to forensic listening projects by Lawrence Abu Hamdan and others; analyzing earwitness testimonies; ‘speculative listening’ (Hartman) to denialist and colonialist archives; and ‘urgent listening’ (Kurda) in times of crisis. The conversation will also reflect on critical approaches to sonic architecture and sonic urbanism, understanding the sonic city as a site of political and social contests and a field in which power relations are expressed and manifested, including in the cases of sonic warfare and atmospheric violence.

Mhamad Safa is a London-based sound artist and architect whose work explores the intersection of multi-scalar spatial conditions and their sonic make-ups. He graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University in 2019 and received his PhD in Law from the University of Westminster in 2024. He is an Associate Lecturer in Architecture and Media Studies at the Royal College of Art in London. Safa had shown individual and collaborative artwork and performances at the Bergen Assembly 2022 (Norway), Goteborg Biennial 2021 (Sweden), Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2019 and Alserkal Arts Foundation (UAE), Sursock Museum and Goethe Institute (Lebanon), The Institute of Contemporary Arts (United Kingdom), among others.

The Sonic Architectures series is organised by Mark Campbell, Mhamad Safa, and Ines Weizman.

Gascia Ouzounian will give a talk from her forthcoming book as part of the lecture series VIDEOGRAM. (Announcement below).

Join us for this semester's final talk in the 𝐕𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐦 lecture series on contemporary curatorial and artistic practice and theory.

🚨 The lecture will take place online via the ZOOM platform. 🚨

––The lecture will be held in English.––

https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/99439620135

𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝘁𝗺𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗰 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗦𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗩𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲

This talk explores atmospheric violence—violence that is pervasive, diffuse, immanent, ‘in the air’—and spatial violence, what Herscher and Siddiqi (2014) have described as ‘the manifold forms of harm mediated through built environments,’ focusing on the role of sound and listening in violence ‘becoming atmospheric’ in cities (M. Peterson 2021). It references earwitness testimonies, citizen journalism, contemporary sound research, and audio investigations pertaining to Gaza and Beirut, including the wartime diaries of the Palestinian writer Atef Abu Saif and ‘private ear’ Lawrence Abu Hamdan in exploring how cities become sites of atmospheric and spatial violence, and how this violence is experienced by those who are subjected to it. How is the listening subject reconfigured when their primary apprehension of the crumbling world around them is through sensing vibrations, including the coupling of their body with the violent shaking of buildings? How do sound and listening participate in the spatial violence that characterizes contemporary forms of urbicide, domicide, and spaciocide (A. Azzouz 2023)? And what strategies have residents, artists, and activists developed to make audible forms of atmospheric violence that otherwise go undetected and unnoticed today?____________________________________

The lecture is a part of the series Videogram at FFA but under the auspices of the Department of Audiovisual Technology. Further programme at https://videogram.favu.vut.cz

Together with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, SONCITIES is co-presenting a workshop on Vibrational Architectures. This workshop, for students in architecture and art, is concerned with the possibilities for vibrational architectures--architectures that privilege vibrational phenomena, including audible and inaudible sound, seismic waves, and mechanical waves--to disrupt and reorient architectural thought.

Whereas architecture is typically imagined in relation to stable, fixed, static, and enduring forms and structures such as monumental buildings, vibrational architectures are unstable, unfixed, dynamic, open, and anarchic. Vibrational architectures generate anarchic spatialities: spatial forms and processes that cannot be contained, predicted, or planned. As such, they present fertile tools through which for thinking architecture and urbanism otherwise.

This workshop introduces concepts and theories of vibrational architecture through the work of such practitioners and theorists who work across sound, vibration, and architecture including Maryanne Amacher, Mark Bain, Nikola Bojić, Steve Goodman, Alvin Lucier, Brett Mommersteeg, Katarzyna Krakowiak, Mendi+Keith Obadike, Gascia Ouzounian, Jonathan Tyrrell, and Jan St. Werner, among others.

It offers participants the chance to experiment with a vibrational platform, Vibraceptional Plate (2024) by Jan St. Werner, commissioned by the SONCITIES research project and exhibited for the first time at the Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti, Zagreb, as part of the exhibition Vibraception - Investigations in Wavespace curated by Ana Škegro. This project evolves as both a vibrating structure and a platform for experimentation and inquiry into vibrational phenomena and perception: an platform that invites auditory and physical encounters with vibrating surfaces, forms, and spaces, and that engages with ideas of “wavespace” (St. Werner).

Vibraceptional Plate emerges out of Jan St. Werner’s years-long investigations into sound as a mode of spatial practice and the creation of anarchic architectures that deploy sound’s material and physical properties, as well as psychoacoustic processes, to challenge the fixity and stability of architectural forms and structures. 

The workshop will also include a design component, whereby participants will be invited to imagine and sketch vibrational architectures and share their designs with the group. Additionally, these design sketches will be shared on the website for the SONCITIES project (soncities.org) and considered for publication in a book, Handbook for Sonic Urbanism.

WORKSHOP CONVENERS

Jan St. Werner, Gascia Ouzounian, Brett Mommersteeg, Nikola Bojic, Ana Skegro

THANK YOU

Damir Gamulin, Ela Domitrovic, University of Zagreb Faculty of Architecture, MSU

Image credit: Jan St. Werner

Dr Christabel Stirling, a former postdoc on SONCITIES and a current British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Royal College of Music, will participate in a panel themed ‘Music and Sound in the City’ at the Royal Musical Association 150 Conference. The panel will also include contributions by Jamie Savan, Susana Zapke, and Laudan Nooshin.

Dr Christabel Stirling, ‘Soundworlds of difference, displacement, and co-existence in South London’

What can an ethnographic approach to the study of cities and their complex sonic-social environments reveal about contemporary urban life? How can urban ethnography conducted in a sonic register contribute to our understanding of the problems and possibilities of life in the twenty-first-century city? This paper offers some reflections on these questions, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted 2021-22 as part of the ERC-funded project SONCITIES. Combining traditional ethnographic methods with experimental participant-centred ‘live methods’ (Back & Puwar 2012), such as audio diaries and hand-drawn mind maps, I explore how social and cultural locations traverse urban sonic experience; how sound gets entangled in the politics of place, belonging, and entitlement on the urban public stage; and how, in densely multicultural cities, previously unrelated people and soundworlds find themselves in proximity in ways that engender both complex negotiations and striking connections.

For more information, please see the RMA 150 Conference website. Special thanks to Simon McVeigh and Abigail Wood, Co-editors in chief of Cambridge Elements in Music and the City, for their support of this panel.

SONCITIES participates in a London Festival of Architecture ‘Walk-shop’ hosted by Meanwhile Space at LJ Works in London with Silent Room V4 by Nathalie Harb with Gerard Gormley. For this event, we will share designs by architects and sound artists that responded to the workshop ‘Designing Sonic Refuge’.

You can view their designs here.

Participating architects include: Nabil Al-Kinani, Alexandria Animba, Hollie Baptiste Douglas, Ethan Cohen, Hani Elias, Indigo Leveson-Gower, Charles Lambert, Midori Komachi, Miranda Shutler, and Chau Anh Tran.

Thank you to Nathalie Harb, Gerard Gormley, Carla Campanero, Freya Bishop, and Meanwhile Space.

*CSM SHOW TALKS: SOUND AND CITY-MAKING*
SONCITIES and MA Cities graduates share their work and thinking

When: Tuesday 11 June, 6:30-8:15 PM
Where: CSM Crossing, at the CSM Queer School tent
For: Anyone. You can also visit the rest of the CSM Show on the preview night after...

This series of talks will explore a range of city-making and city-shaping practices. Topics include research into urbicide, which will be discussed in the keynote talk at 6:30 from Gascia Ouzounian, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, alongside extracts and learnings from the research of ten MA Cities graduating students. Their work explores city-making practices as varies as swimming as an urban communing practice, the role of a creative 'class' in how Athens is changing, social infrastructures in Cairo, how myth in built into the city, and city-making curricula for children. 

We will also share highlights from the SONCITIES Design Week (‘Quiet Urgency’), in which students from CSM's two Architecture courses, MA Industrial Design and MA Cities are involved.

Each talk will have time for reflection and audience response.

REGISTRATION
To attend: Please register on Eventbrite for the CSM Show preview on Tuesday 11 June.

Workshop: Sonic Refuge: Designing Sonic Architectures

Conveners: Nathalie Harb, Gerard Gormley, Gascia Ouzounian

For: Architects, urban designs, sound artists; students currently enrolled in sound, architecture, or urban design / urban planning / urban studies programmes

When/where: 2-5 PM, LJ Works, 5 Gastineau Yard, Loughborough Junction, SW9 7FA

To register: Please send an informal email to gascia@gmail.com describing your interests/background in sound, architecture, or urban design/urban planning.

This workshop will explore approaches to designing sonic architectures. We will encounter a range of works that span sound art, architecture, and urban design; we will also listen collectively to sounds that signal home and belonging, or, alternatively, displacement, conflict, and exclusion. Participants will then be invited to create sketches for installations, architectures, and spatial designs that respond to the theme of sonic refuge. We will discuss these designs, which will be featured in a London Festival of Architecture walk-through event at LJ Works in Loughborough Junction on Saturday 15 June, and on the website soncities.org. 

The workshop is offered on the occasion of the launch of Silent Room V.04. Commissioned by SONCITIES and hosted by Meanwhile Space, Silent Room V.04 is a sonic architecture by Nathalie Harb, part of a series of urban typologies that reimagine the city through listening. Its tent-like structure evokes a refuge, claiming the city as a place of belonging and rest. Responding to the Loughborough Junction railway station site, it is a meditation on migration and movement. A soundtrack by Gerard Gormley transplants other sounds into the site, acting as a sonic crossroads. Silent Room is a call to attune to the city of the future as a dwelling-place centred around human well-being.

Nathalie Harb is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based between Paris and Beirut. She creates public interventions, installations, and set designs that question the notions of home, shelter and agency by proposing an alternative use of our daily habitat. Forming Nathalie Harb Studio in 2017, she envisions it as a collaborative space where diverse practitioners, musicians, acoustic consultants, permaculture experts, environmental advisors, and architects, among others, converge to shape projects spanning urban interventions, community workshops, and exhibitions. The studio’s projects have been supported by such organisations and initiatives as UNESCO’s Week of Sound, the American University Beirut’s Neighborhood Initiative, the London Design Biennale, the British Council, and the European Research Council.

Gerard Gormley is an Irish sound artist whose work explores the actual and latent sonic potentials of spaces, buildings, and sites. His work evolves through various experimental processes that explore sound in relation to space and architecture. This might be an iterative process of recording sounds and vibrations at a site and playing them back into that site, such that the site becomes a carrier of sound and music that was created from it; or transplanting sounds from one place to another, bringing various places and their sonic and material histories into dialogue. Much of his work is granular and hyper-detailed, taking place at the level of microsonic and micro-textural investigation. It has been shown at daadgalerie, After (Berlin), The MAC Belfast, Modern Art Oxford, Cannes Festival, Storung Festival (Spain), The Cube at Virginia Tech, and broadcast nationally on cinema and television in Ireland and the UK.

Gascia Ouzounian is a sonic theorist and practitioner whose work explores sound in relation to space, architecture, urbanism, and violence. She is associate professor of music at the University of Oxford, where she leads the project Sonorous Cities: Towards as Sonic Urbanism (soncities.org).

—

This workshop is part of a series of events, Quiet Urgency: Disturbing Sonic Ecologies, co-organised by Gascia Ouzounian, John Bingham-Hall and Diana Ibáñez López, and co-presented by MA Cities at Central Saint Martins and the SONCITIES research programme at the University of Oxford, 5-30 June 2024.

Commissioned by SONCITIES, Silent Room V.04 is a sonic architecture by Nathalie Harb, part of a series of urban typologies that reimagine the city through listening. Its tent-like structure evokes a refuge, claiming the city as a place of belonging and rest. Responding to the Loughborough Junction railway station site, it is a meditation on migration and movement. A soundtrack by Gerard Gormley transplants other sounds into the site, acting as a sonic crossroads. Silent Room V.04 is a call to attune to the city of the future as a dwelling-place centred around human well-being.

Concept and design: Nathalie Harb
Bamboo expertise: Mauricio Cardenas
Architect: Alexandros Tzortzis de Paz
Sound: Gerard Gormley
Curator: Gascia Ouzounian

Open daily 12 PM-5 PM, 8-30 June

Launch: 3 PM, 8 June. Saturday 8 June, 2024
A conversation with Nathalie Harb, Gerard Gormley, Diana Ibáñez López and John Bingham-Hall, on the sonic city and listening as a method for urban inquiry. We will discuss the right to quiet in the city and how design interventions such as Silent Room could help make a fairer and healthier sonic environment. Moderated by Diana Ibáñez-López. All are welcome. Refreshments will be served. Please note that tickets are required for this event (see below).

Tickets/Booking for Launch on 8 June:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/silent-room-v04-launch-lfa2024-tickets-877420246577

Location: LJ Works 5 Gastineau Yard, Loughborough Junction, SW9 7FA

LJ Works can be publicly accessed Monday-Friday 12pm-5pm via the three pedestrian gates, located on Loughborough Road, Rathgar Road and Styles Gardens.

Organisers: Meanwhile Space

Quiet Urgency: disturbing sonic ecologies

Wednesday 5 June 2024, 9.30 AM - 6 PM, Central Saint Martins (N1C)

Registration. Please register here. Please note that space is limited, so please register only if you are sure to attend. There are separate tickets for morning and afternoon.

The symposium will ask what it means to think about sound through an ecological framework, and about ecology through a sonic framework. It will ask how urban design has shaped ecologies of sound, but also how the sonic agency of non-human life exceeds and disturbs what can be planned. Should green spaces be considered quiet zones, as they are in urban sound policy, when this imaginary is disturbed by the vibrant sonics of non-human life? Are the sounds of infrastructure and technology part of this ecological vitality, or themselves disturbances to it? How can refuge from sonic disturbance be designed if we think beyond silence as an acoustic ideal?

09.30 Arrival

10:00 Welcome by Gascia Ouzounian, John Bingham-Hall, and Diana Ibáñez López

10.30 Jacek Smolicki – Technologies and Techniques of Deterrent Listening. On Ecotones of Białowieża Forest

The talk focuses on past, present and future soundscapes of Białowieża Forest, an ancient ecosystem located at the border of Poland and Belarus recently highlighted due to the political stand-off between the two countries and their violence against migrants crossing the forest. The talk brings attention to how various forms of sonic and listening techniques are mobilized and immobilized in and around the forest, in order to exert control over its vulnerable ecosystems of humans and other species. Discussion moderated by Gascia Ouzounian.

11:30 Panel: Sensing more-than-human soundscapes. Chaired by John Bingham-Hall

Ella Finer – Acoustic Commons and the Wild Life of Sound

Drawing on her ongoing work, thinking through what a commons is in sonic terms, Ella will briefly illustrate a productive tension--some necessary agitations--across the idea of the commons and the idea of the wild. Even discussing such terms necessitates definition, some boundaries drawn around meaning; who makes the boundaries of the commons, and for whom? 

Catherine Clover – Languaging with the birds of King’s Cross station
Sound and location are deeply intertwined for birds as for all species including ourselves. In advance of her workshop on Thursday, Cath will discuss her work on participatory voicing.

Alex de Little – Tentacular Listening

Alex will discuss ideas around Tentacular Listening, an extended listening and reading walk that engages cross-pollinating practices of collective reading and extended listening.

13.00 Lunch

14.00 Maan Barua & Mriganka Madhukaillya – Amphibious: three surrounds

In this lecture performance Mriganka Madhukaillya and Maan Barua aim to formulate a different optic and account of urban life to those on record in mainstream theory. From an ongoing discussion they develop the concept of the amphibious – or life (bios) in its surrounds (amphi-) – to delineate the space-times and practices of urban habitation within and beyond capture. Discussion moderated by John Bingham-Hall

15:00 Panel: Designing just sonic ecologies. Chaired by Gascia Ouzounian

Nathalie Harb – Silent Room: designs for sonic justice

Nathalie will discuss ideas around Silent Room, exploring what it means to design structures offering access to sonic rest and retreat for those most affected by the city's noise. The project has been evolving since 2017 as a series of public space interventions, and its fourth version commissioned by SONCITIES will be installed at LJ Works in London throughout June.

Sarah Lappin – Quiet Rooms in Belfast: An Architectural Design Project in Undergraduate Education

The paper details a history of sound + design projects at Queen’s University. Inspired by Nathalie Harb, the most recent project asked students to consider sound and their environment, culminating in a design for an "Urban Quiet Room" in two of Belfast's loudest public spaces.

Ellie Ratcliffe – The value of nature's sounds for psychological wellbeing

Ellie will discuss findings from past and current projects regarding benefits of nature sounds (especially birdsong) for psychological wellbeing, including the ability to recover from everyday stress and fatigue, and implications for urban planning.

Adriana Cobo Corey – Maintenance Joy

In this presentation Adriana will critically inspect the impact maintenance labour has on iconic public spaces, using projects tailored to Granary Square in King’s Cross as examples. She will ask: Who maintains public spaces? And what are the intersections between maintenance, ethics and joy?   

16:30 Countersonics: Radical Sonic Imaginaries: A Conversation between Gascia Ouzounian & KMRU

17:00 Closing remarks and conversation chaired by Diana Ibáñez López

18:00 End

PARTICIPANTS

Adriana Cobo Corey is an architect, spatial practitioner and educator. She researches on contemporary public space and architectural taste. Her work draws intersections between maintenance, ethics and joy in spatial practice. She is Senior Lecturer in Ethical Practice at Central Saint Martins - UAL.

Alex de Little is a sonic artist and researcher based in Leeds and London. His artistic practice involves listening as a practice of world-making, a way of thinking through social, material and ecological relations. He is a Lecturer in Performance and Creative Practice at the University of Leeds and a certified Deep Listening facilitator.

Catherine Clover’s multidisciplinary practice addresses communication across species through voice, language and the interplay between hearing/listening, seeing/reading.

Diana Ibáñez López is an urbanist working at the intersections of spatial practice, policy and design strategy. They are Course Leader of MA Cities at Central Saint Martins, pioneering city-making practices that centre social and climate justice. 

Eleanor Ratcliffe is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Psychology at University of Surrey. Her research focuses on how physical environments can support wellbeing, including experiences of nature, natural sounds, and favourite places.

Ella Finer’s work continuously queries the ownership of cultural expression, through sound; often through collaborative projects centring listening as a practice of deep attention, affiliation and reciprocity.

Gascia Ouzounian is a sonic theorist and practitioner whose work deals with questions of sound in relation to space, technology, urbanism, and violence. She is the author of Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts (MIT Press, 2021), and the forthcoming The Trembling City (MIT Press). At Oxford she leads the Sonorous Cities project (soncities.org).

Jacek Smolicki, PhD, is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator. His work explores temporal, existential and technological dimensions of listening, recording and archiving practices in human and more-than-human contexts. He is affiliated with Uppsala University and works across multiple ecotones between academic and non-academic realms.

John Bingham-Hall is an independent researcher engaging performance, infrastructure and ecology to understand how bioclimatic urbanism is transforming the public cultures of cities. His work unfolds through teaching, writing, and creative practice in London, Paris and Marseille.

Joseph Kamaru, aka KMRU, is an experimental sound artist and ambient musician, raised in Nairobi, Kenya, and currently based in Berlin. His works engage with field recording, improvisation, noise, ambient, machine learning, radio art and expansive hypnotic drones.

Maan Barua is an urban and environmental geographer whose work examines the politics, economies and ontologies of the living and material world. He is the author of Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and the forthcoming Plantation Worlds (August 2024, Duke University Press).

Mriganka Madhukaillya is an artist and film-maker. He is an assistant professor of New Media Technology and Cinema, as well as the founder of the Media Lab within the Department of Design at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

Nathalie Harb is a multidisciplinary artist and designer. She creates public interventions, installations, and set designs, that question the notions of home, shelter and agency by proposing an alternative use of our daily habitat.

Architect Dr Sarah Lappin is past Head of Architecture at Queen’s University, co-founder of the All-Ireland Architectural Research Group and past Chair of the Architectural Humanities Research Association. With Gascia Ouzounian, she co-founded the Recomposing the City research group.

Sven Anderson is an artist, researcher, and architectural consultant. He is Director of the Masters in Digital Arts and Intermedia Practices at Trinity College Dublin. Between 2021 - 2023 he developed the project Sound-Frameworks with Theatrum Mundi.

Workshop: A Building Made of Sound: Yerevan Sonic Architectures

Presented by @quartertone_ as part of Crossroads Festival

Conveners: Gascia Ouzounian and Ruben Antonyan

In this workshop, students from the Yerevan Komitas State Conservatory will explore the architecture of the conservatory building through listening, sound recording, and acoustic sensing. Over the course of one day, we will listen to and record the building’s interior and exterior spaces using a variety of sensors: acoustic microphones, electromagnetic sensors, and contact microphones (which sense mechanical vibrations and convert those vibrations into sound). We will also excite the building using musical instruments; however, we will not use these instruments to make music, but rather as devices for activating acoustic architectural responses such as echoes and vibrations. This vibrational and acoustic exploration of the building will form the basis of a collective composition that will reveal the building as a sonic architecture heard, experienced, and activated by the group. We will listen to the building both as a self-contained architecture and as a structure which is in dialogue with the sounds of the city that surrounds it, connecting the building to its wider urban context in Yerevan. Coming out of the workshop, we will collectively produce an album of the Yerevan State Conservatory reimagined as a building made of sound.

This is Ouzounian’s second workshop with Crossroads Festival. In 2023, Ouzounian and Eve Egoyan hosted ‘Scoring: Yerevan,’ for which participants created scores about spaces in Yerevan using graphic notation, text scores, photography, and musical improvisation.

Workshop for students in the field of sound studies / (electro-acoustic) composition: Form(ing) Matter (of) Sound
30th of April, 10 am – 6 pm
with Samuel Perea-Díaz & Jona Wolf
participation upon registration only
Call for Participants

Workshop Hosts

Samuel Perea-Díaz is a cross-disciplinary artist, architect, and lecturer. His practice spans sound art, exhibition design, and curation. Samuel´s artist practice on sound and archival practices, constantly exploring how sonic activism and aural architecture can impact listening. He has created site-specific installations and sound-focused objects that deal with sonification, sound relocation, field recording, and Virtual Reality.

Jona Wolf is a trans-disciplinary artist, workshop facilitator and researcher. Their practice focuses on reimagining and transforming educational practices, processes of (un)learning and collaborative creation. They have been teaching in several institutions like Leibniz University Hanover, University Kassel, University for Angewandte Kunst Vienna and University Innsbruck. They are part of The Palace Collective and involved in co-producing an annual art residency program accommodating 150 artists in Poland.

Image: Transitory Sonic Bodies by Samuel Perea-Díaz and Jona Wolf

Workshop for students in the field of architecture:
Sound Space Sense
29th of April, 10.30 am – 4.30 pm, daadgalerie, Berlin
with Jan St. Werner, Gascia Ouzounian & Dahlia Borsche
participation upon registration only
Call for Participants

Part 1: A short introduction to Sound Space Sense 

Workshop host: Jan St. Werner

There is still a great deal of uncertainty about the physics, biology, signifiers and unconscious processes on the basis of which auditory experiences are constructed. Jan St. Werner’s introduction applies the methods of artistic research to convey a sense of how mental space, social practice and the direct experience of sound relate to each other and how connections are generated between these levels – a topology of resonances, reflections and vibrations in perpetual motion.

https://spectorbooks.com/book/sound-space-sense-en

Biography for Jan St. Werner Jan St. Werner is a Berlin-based electronic music artist and composer. Widely known as one half of the electronic music group Mouse on Mars, Werner always seeks a dialogue with the visual arts in his sound works. He defies traditional tuning systems and instead centers his works on bringing together variable elements. Werner has realized sound interventions and exhibitions in art spaces such as the ICA London, documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. In 2021 and 2022, his spatial sound exhibitions were presented at the Kunstbau Lenbachhaus and at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg, as well as at the 6th Ural Biennial.  From 2017 to 2021, Werner was Professor of Interactive Media/Dynamic Acoustic Research at the Nuremberg Academy of Fine Arts. Previously, he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in Boston. 

Part 2: Designing Sonic Materialities and Sonic Architectures

Workshop hosts: Dahlia Borsche and Gascia Ouzounian

This workshop will begin with a tour of the Open Lab space for Concrete Dreams of Sound. We will encounter a range of works and experiments in sonic materiality, including projects that confound traditional ideas about sound’s relationship to the material world. We will connect this to experimental practices in sonic architecture, introducing works that span sound art, architecture, urban design, and critical spatial practices. Participants will then be invited to create sketches for installations, architectures, and spatial designs that respond to the themes of sonic materiality and sonic architecture. We will discuss these designs, asking how they invite us to rethink what architecture can be when it is reimagined in relation to sound, vibration, listening, and sonic matter.

Biography for Dahlia Borsche Dahlia Borsche is musicologist and curator. In 2019 she took on the position of Head of Music at the DAAD Artist-In-Berlin programme. Borsche has been active as promoter, DJ, coordination manager, and producer (CTM Festival Berlin, Labor Sonor et alt.). From 2014-2019 she co-curated CTM’s Discourse programme. As a musicologist, her most recent engagement was at Humboldt-University’s Chair for Trans-Cultural Musicology in the Department of Musicology and Media Studies. Her research interests focus on contemporary and transcultural music processes, thereby expanding traditional discipline boundaries to the fields of sound, urban, and cultural studies.

Image: courtesy of Jan St. Werner

26.04.2024 / 16:00 – 17:30

Gathering to recollect, connect, and resonate with geological memories, Alchemyverse presents WEND, a performance workshop that gestures our eyes and ears, bodies and spirits towards the telluric, the decaying, the transitory, and the unfixed. In the work, both geologic and ecological relics encode, meld, and activate each other to perform the becoming of an interspecific entity. WEND redirects the passive spectator’s gaze, pivoting instead to stage an embodied and ecological rhythm of time and perception. The workshop invites the audience to partake through close observation, auditory attentiveness, tactile exploration, and resonance. 

The workshop is hosted by The Artists-in-Berlin Program and SONCITIES in the framework of Concrete Dreams of Sound. The participation is free and does not require any previous knowledge. The workshop language is English. Due to limited capacities please register in advance with an informal email to Sebastian Dürer: duerer.berlin(AT)daad.de.

Alchemyverse was founded by artists Bicheng Liang and Yixuan Shao in New York. The duo began their collaboration at the MFA program at Columbia University. Bicheng Liang received his BFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, China. Yixuan Shao received her BA from University of California, San Diego. They combine their respective knowledge bases and skills in printmaking and sound studies, with intensive field research to form their collaborative practice. Recent selected solo and group exhibitions include International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York; Praise Shadows Gallery, Massachusetts; Asia Art Archive in America, New York; The Bishop Museum, Hawai’i; Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University, New York, and among others. Residencies include LMCC Governors Island, New York; Desert 23°S, La Wayaka Current, Chile; AAA-A Zine Residency, Brooklyn; and the Rabbit Island Residency, Lake Superior, Michigan. Currently, they are in residence at ISCP.

daadgalerie, Oranienstr. 161, 10969 Berlin

Photo: “WEND-Performance” by Alchemyverse (Bicheng Liang & Yixuan Shao), 2023

Part of the Concrete Dreams of Sound programme, this symposium brings together an international group of artists, architects, and theorists whose work invites us to rethink the material nature of sound and the possibilities of a sonic architecture.

It includes presentations, conversations, and performances by Merche Blasco, whose work makes audible the ‘vibrant matter’ uniting human and non-human worlds; Katarzyna Krakowiak, who creates vibrational architectures that enhance, rather than attenuate, sonic and vibrational phenomena, including the much-lauded Polish Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture; Mendi+Keith Obadike, whose vital transmissions include broadcasting a composition concerned with race and power via the glass façade of a building in Manhattan, as in their public sound work Blues Speaker [for James Baldwin] (2015); Marina Peterson, whose work attunes to ‘vibrating matter’ and how sound materializes as noise, air, and atmosphere; Jonathan Tyrrell, who challenges paradigms in architectural acoustics by privileging the material transmission of sound over the frameworks of resonance and reverberation; and Jan St. Werner, who conceives of sound as spatial practice, and who creates anarchic architectures that deploy sound’s material and physical properties, as well as psychoacoustic processes, to challenge the fixity and stability of architectural forms and structures.

The symposium is hosted by The Artists-in-Berlin Program and SONCITIES in the framework of Concrete Dreams of Sound.

It will take place in English. The admission is free, no registration required.

Program:
9.30 am coffee
10 am Jonathan Tyrrell, Architecture’s Acoustic Shadow 
11 am Katarzyna Krakowiak
–lunch break–
2 pm Jan St. Werner
3 pm Mendi+Keith Obadike, Blues Speaker / Book of Light 
4 pm Marina Peterson (response)
6 pm Vibrant Matter, live performance by Merche Blasco

daadgalerie Oranienstr. 161, 10969 Berlin

Photo: Vibrant Matter (2019) by Merche Blasco. Photo by Michael Sullivan

As part of the Concrete Dreams of Sound programme, we will present a listening session featuring compositions that engage ideas of sonic materiality. This session will be held in a private space in Kreuzberg, Berlin. To attend, please send an email to soncitiesproject[at]gmail.com by Sunday 21 April, and we will send you the location details.

Listening Session | Wednesday April 24, 2024

Doors open: 6.30 PM

Programme: 7.00-8.00 PM, followed by drinks

Gerard Gormley, Concrete Dreams of Sound I (3:34)

Samuel Perea-Díaz, Untitled (topoanalysis) (excerpt) (6:21)

Jonathan Tyrell, Pyroclasatic Earth Gut (2:52)

Signe Lidén, Boreal (6:30)

Charles Richards, Stone Synth 001, (9:36)

Gerard Gormley, Concrete Dreams of Sound IV (8:34)

-interval-

Yara Mekawei, Kairo Blau (12:03)

Andrius Arutiunian, Do Not Fear, Then! (13:29)

Gascia Ouzounian will join a group of researchers for a panel discussion hosted by the Bartlett on delineating future research agendas in soundscape and acoustics study. The panel discussion will be published as part of the forthcoming book The Book of Ideas: 60 Years of Environmental Design and Engineering at the Bartlett.

The bookstore do you read me? in Berlin will host a group of sound scholars to celebrate the release of Sound - Space - Sense. They include Jan St. Werner (Mouse on Mars), Detlef Diederichsen, Gascia Ouzounian, Patricia Reed, Paolo Thorsen-Nagel, and Arno Raffeiner.
⁠⁠
DNA #21 – Sound Space Sense⁠⁠. Edited by Jan St. Werner, Arno Raffeiner, and Detlef Diederichsen. The book applies the methods of artistic research to convey a sense of how mental space, social practice and the direct experience of sound relate to each other and how connections are generated between these levels – a topology of resonances, reflections and vibrations in perpetual motion.

A second event will take place at d59b as part of CTM Festival’s ‘Unbreak my Radio’, 19.30-22.30 on Wednesday, 31 January. With contributions by:

J.-P. Caron & Patricia Reed
Detlef Diederichsen
Wolf Lieser
Gascia Ouzounian
Marcin Pietruszewski
Arno Raffeiner
Paolo Thorsen-Nagel
Jan St. Werner

Radio.D59B.Com

Gascia Ouzounian looks forward to joining Dr Ammar Azouz (Geography) and Professor Zofia Stemploswka (Politics and International Relations) for a TORCH Book at Lunchtime session to discuss Azzouz’s Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria.

For event details, please visit TORCH.

SONCITIES postdoctoral fellow Dr Matilde Meireles presents her current research.

The Colloquia feature leading figures, as well as younger scholars, from across the world. They present their research in papers on all kinds of music-related topics. Graduate students Stephanie Shon and Francis Bertschinger organise the series. Presentations are followed by discussion and a drinks reception. Students, staff and the general public are warmly encouraged to attend, in person or online. Free and open to all.

As part of the Seminar in Ethnomusicology and Sound Studies at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, SONCITIES is delighted to co-present the following lecture by Professor James Parker (Melbourne Law School).

The lecture will take place at Mark Bedingham Room, St. John’s College, Oxford, 5.15-6.30 PM on Monday 27 November. It will be followed by a reception. All are welcome / open to the public.

‘The Planetization of Machine Listening’
This paper addresses an emerging literature in which computer scientists, bio- and eco-acousticians, and their state and industry partners propose installing machine listening systems throughout the biosphere for ecological purposes, and especially in response to climate change. In this literature, nowhere and no sounds are off-limits. Smart cities, skies, rivers, oceans, seas, ice caps, forests, parks, roads, and reefs. What is being imagined is the full ‘planetization’ (Hui 2020) of audio AI: the automated monitoring, analysis, modulation, and governance of both human and non-human planetary systems by means of computational renderings of the soundscape. Where does all this lead, I wonder? What trajectory is being embarked upon? What kind of planet would the planetization of machine listening make? What kinds of human and nonhuman subjects inhabiting it? What types of institutions might the implementation of machine listening at earth magnitude require? Wielding and subject to which forms of power?

James Parker is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School, where he works across legal scholarship, art criticism, curation, and production. Since 2020, he has been working with curator Joel Stern and artist Sean Dockray on Machine Listening, a platform for research, sharing, and artistic experimentation, focused on the critique of new and emerging forms of listening grounded in artificial intelligence and machine learning. James is a current Australia Research Council DECRA fellow, former visiting fellow at the Program for Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School for Government, and sits on the advisory board of Earshot, an NGO specialising in audio forensics.

Acknowledgements: The Seminar in Ethnomusicology and Sound Studies is convened by Professor Jason Stanyek at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford. We are grateful to Professor Stanyek and the Faculty of Music for their support of this event.

Gascia Ouzounian will be a keynote speaker at the symposium Beyond Listening: Agency, Art and the Environment, in Budapest, Hungary, 22-25 November 2023. Her talk is titled ‘Death Cities: Hearing Atmospheric and Spatial Violence’. For more information, please see the symposium website here: https://cense.earth/beyond-listening

Gascia Ouzounian will join Louis Chude-Sokei, Yara Mekawei, and Jan St. Werner in this online webinar hosted by Goethe-Institut, Boston. The webinar will explore what listening and sound-making can bring to historical inquiry. Gascia will present from her paper ‘Soundscapes of the Metropolis of Death’, developed in the context of exploring sites associated with histories of violence in Nuremberg, Germany. To register, please follow this link: https://t.co/BGCi07UyTF

Dr Ruth Bernatek will give an invited talk & workshop to students at the Bartlett School of Architecture, as part of the Architecture and Interdisciplinary Studies degree program.

Responding to the theme of 'voice', this session will introduce some of the ways that urban sounds can be used to creatively and critically guide us around the city, exploring how sounds can provide alternative routes of engagement and amplify less noticed social dimensions of urban life.

With thanks to Tom Keeley & Dr Sophie Read for the invitation.

27th August 2023

Matilde Meireles will launch her new album, Vanishing Points, at Lisboa Soa Festival in Lisbon, Portugal. The album will be released by Crónica Electrónica on the 22nd of August.

Vanishing Points is a documental drift that explores how everyday urban flows intersect with our own personal rhythms as we move through urban environments. For this album, Matilde Meireles interchanged between her smartphone and a small hi-spec field recorder connected to an electromagnetic sensor and stereo microphones to record her movements through different spaces. These included the quiet space of her home; the old railway line where she often runs; the busy trains as she commutes; the crowded London tube lines; and the flows of people and traffic in the dense urban environments of Brixton and Bristol. As she traverses these spaces, it becomes clear how everyday scenarios brim with life, energy and activity. These flows are a consequence of our participation in contemporary societies. Such an intense sonic abundance highlights the unsustainable future of urban environments. But what we can learn from these movements and how can we contribute to alternative futures?

For her album launch at Lisboa Soa, Matilde will introduce Vanishing Points by reinterpreting the composition with new recordings of her movements in Lisbon, the city where she comes from. In this cumulative process these moments intertwine to create a ghostly map of Matilde’s everyday movements.

http://www.cronicaelectronica.org