How to live together in sound?
Towards sonic democracy

"Čuoikkariššu/Mosquito Shower" is a sound installation co-designed by Italian-Sardinian sound artist and eco- anthropologist Nicola Renzi and Indigenous Sámi scholar and yoik performer Mai Britt Utsi. The work explores contrasting dynamics of discomfort and coexistence by focusing on the itchy sound of mosquitoes, tiny beings with an outsized ecological role in the complex entanglement of human societies and increasingly fragile Arctic ecosystems. In this sense, the installation relates strongly to the theme of the symposium, inviting audiences to rethink mosquitoes not as isolated pests or nuisances, but as vital participants in a dense web of relations linking humans, multispecies communities, and environmental change. The design of the piece is informed by the ecological knowledge of Sámi and other Arctic Indigenous peoples, within which mosquito sounds are known to inspire and sustain oral traditions shared by humans and the Land. The installation therefore does not simply seek to read and translate mosquito sounds and ecological roles through multispecies storytelling; it also invites listeners to question conventional boundaries between cultural and natural heritage, as well as broader ethno-anthropocentric understandings of musicality and related aesthetics. In practical terms, the installation uses a stereo sound shower, a speaker system that vertically sends sound into a small area below it, so that a listener can stand underneath and hear the work closely, without the sound spreading too much into the rest of the space. This creates an intimate and physical listening experience, as if the listener is literally “showered” in clouds of mosquito. Because not every venue can install a sound shower, the piece also exists in a binaural version for headphones. The work is composed of binaural recordings of Culex pipiens swarms buzzing and stinging around Nicola Renzi’s ears in northern Norway, first tangled with traditional mosquito yoik melodies performed by Mai Britt Utsi, and then digitally processed so that her voice blends with that of the insects. A mosquito net and thin threads intensify the itchy sensation, while a 10-verse poem by Mai Britt Utsi displays intersectional values. If one stops long enough to listen, a melody will emerge from the buzzing.

Nicola Renzi

Nicola Renzi (PhD) is an Italian-Sardinian anthropologist and ecologist of sound, as well as a sound artist and filmmaker. Through interdisciplinary scholarship and artistic practice, he explores how relations between humans and environments emerge through listening, sounding, and their entanglement with ecological change and power. He works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre of Excellence “MultiBEING Justice in Indigenous Societies” (University of Helsinki). His research project — ITCHES (Insects, Tundra, Co-existence, Heritages, and Ecologies of Sounds) — investigates the ecological role and cultural significance of mosquito sounds within Indigenous oral traditions of the circumpolar North. In 2025, he completed dual PhDs in Indigenous Studies at the University of Helsinki and in Anthropology of Sound at the University of Bologna.

Mai Britt Utsi

Mai Britt Utsi (Uhca Pier Esthera Máijá) is a Sámi researcher and joik performer based in Guovdageaidnu. An assistant professor and current PhD candidate at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences, her research focuses on Sámi storytelling traditions and the study of history and diversity of luođit (yoik melodies) in the Várjjat–Varanger region (her home area). Since 1990, she has played a central role in developing Sámi higher education, serving as leader of the Sámi teacher education program, later as rector (2003–2007) and dean (2012–2016). Across fieldwork, academic venues, and art spaces, Nicola & Mai Britt’s work asks how we might create space for other-than-human voices that are systematically excluded from colonial systems of value, yet act as constitutive participants in shared heritages and increasingly conflictual sound worlds.

→ Experience this sound installation at the back of the hall during the breaks.

One Last Evening in Kashihara (2025) is an electroacoustic work based on a field recording made on the banks of the Yamato River in Kashihara, Japan. The soundscape, largely shaped by the continuous presence of water, alongside distant traffic and the six o’clock chime, forms a quiet yet layered acoustic environment. The prominence of water, drawn from both the original recording and additional archival materials, becomes a central element in the work, unfolding as a sonic study of flow, continuity, and temporal suspension. The recording carries a situated gesture: it was captured shortly before the recordist left the city, returning to the river to mark a final moment of presence. This act of listening and recording becomes embedded within the sonic material, leaving an affective trace that informs the compositional process. The work explores how shared sonic environments hold and transmit memory as an individual experience, and as part of a broader acoustic common. The river functions as a site of continuity, where everyday sounds like signals, infrastructures, and environmental flows coexist and become collectively inhabited. Through subtle transformations and attentive framing, the piece reflects on listening as a relational practice that mediates presence, absence, and belonging. It asks how sonic environments can carry traces of departure while remaining open, shared, and continuously reconfigured by those who pass through them. Stereo piece.

Sara Ramírez Márquez

Sara Ramírez Márquez, 2001 Composer from Bogotá. She studied Composition for Films and Media at Universidad de los Andes and Electroacoustic Composition at the University of Birmingham. Her works have been performed internationally in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Poland, Colombia, Argentina, and Thailand; and her original scores have featured in films officially selected for the Birmingham Film Festival and the Bogotá International Film Festival. Her interests revolve around immersive sound, environmental sound, and religious studies. Her current creative practice integrates electronic improvisation, poetry, spoken text, and multilingualism.

Manchester Soundscape is a three-part audio composition investigating the intersections of urban public soundscapes, historical memory, and shared aural experiences. The work opens on a cold April afternoon in Manchester, capturing the city’s everyday sonic environment – from footsteps and traffic hum to bicycle bells – leading listeners through St. Peter’s Square toward the Corn Exchange, where clinking glasses and ambient human activity reflect social interaction in shared spaces. The composition then transitions into an abstract sonic landscape, employing electronic tones, synthesizers, and processed city sounds to evoke lingering traces of the 1996 bombing, highlighting how collective history shapes urban auditory experience. The final segment returns to reality with resonant church bells and the gentle flow of water at Long Millgate, grounding the piece in tangible space. By integrating field recordings, physical objects, and electronic processing, this work examines how public sonic spaces are inhabited and experienced, emphasizing both human and non-human presence. It engages with questions central to sonic democracy: How do communities coexist within shared soundscapes? What ethical responsibilities arise in the production, dissemination, and interpretation of urban and ecological sound? Running 12:58 minutes, the full version preserves the work’s narrative and spatial integrity, providing an immersive auditory exploration. Manchester Soundscape aligns with the symposium’s focus on togetherness, ethical listening, and more-than-human co-existence, offering insight into how sonic practices can shape social, cultural, and ecological life in urban environments.

Dingling Ying

Dingling Ying is a composer, sound artist, and pianist working across electroacoustic and acousmatic composition, field recording, soundscape practice, and experimental electronic music. She studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the NOVARS Research Centre at the University of Manchester. Her practice explores urban and natural soundscapes, memory, place, and perception through field recordings, fixed-media composition, electronic processing, and transformed sonic textures. Working between documentary listening and abstract sonic narrative, her work considers how sound shapes experiences of place and evokes personal, social, and cultural memory. Her works have been presented internationally across Asia, Europe, and South America in festival, concert, listening-room, and exhibition contexts, including the Ars Electronica Festival and MANTIS Festival 20th Anniversary.

This work explores the presence of a shared and ever present sonic commons that exists beyond the limits of human hearing. Contemporary urban space is saturated with electromagnetic activity, wireless communication, and continuous sensing systems, forming a dense field of signals that structure everyday life while remaining largely imperceptible. These infrastructures produce a sonic commons that is not equally accessible, perceptible, or controlled. Indeed in some cases this unheard commons can be listening itself. Using electromagnetic induction and contact-based recording techniques, this piece captures fragments of these hidden signal environments, including emissions from personal devices, network infrastructure, and electrical systems. These recordings translated into the spatial domain using the 4D Sound engine and ambisonic techniques. The resulting audio reveals a shifting and unstable sonic environment, an unheard layer to out everyday sonic commons. The unheard and the heard commons are juxtaposed in this work, using ambisonic recordings of public spaces in Auckland, New Zealand. Alongside these signal-based materials, the work engages with the conditions of contemporary listening under regimes of pervasive sensing and surveillance. While individuals experience sound as embodied and selective, institutional systems increasingly operate through continuous, distributed listening, producing asymmetries in how sonic space is perceived and controlled. The sonic commons is therefore not a neutral or shared resource, but a site shaped by uneven access, ownership, and extraction. The composition unfolds as a dynamic field of layered signals, interference patterns, and intermittent presences, in which elements emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure over time. Rather than presenting a stable or unified auditory scene, the work foregrounds fragmentation and partiality, reflecting the ways in which shared environments are experienced differently by those who inhabit them. In addressing questions of sonic democracy, this work proposes that the challenge is not only to reveal what cannot be heard, but to reconsider how listening itself is distributed, mediated, and governed. By engaging with the unseen infrastructures of contemporary life, Unheard Commons invites reflection on how we coexist within sonic environments that we neither fully perceive nor equally share.

Ben Leonard

Ben Leonard (BJ Leo) is a sonic artist, composer, and producer from Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa New Zealand. His work focuses on experimental spatialisation techniques, combining multi-array loudspeaker systems and spectral decomposition to create immersive, site-specific installations. He is a graduate of Te Kōkī – New Zealand School of Music, where he focused on spatial audio and ambisonic composition. His practice explores the construction and organisation of sound in space, with a particular interest in Bregman’s theories on fusion and fission. His recent practice has focused on applying those ideas to spectral decomposition and spatial synthesis. In 2025, Ben was an Artist in Residence at SpaesLab in Berlin and the 4DSOUND Spatial Sound Institute workshop in Amsterdam, supported by Creative New Zealand. His first solo exhibition, Breathwork (Toi Pōneke, 2024), explored the sonic properties of air through immersive spatial audio systems. He has released work on labels including Finest Ego (DE), Related Articles (NZ), and Strange Behaviour (NZ), and has presented work and artist talks at the International and Australasian Computer Music Conferences. EDUCATION Te Kōkī – New Zealand School of Music MFA (Music / Sonic Arts), 2022 AUT University Postgraduate Diploma in Communications, 2020 University of Auckland BA / LLB, 2012 SELECTED EXPERIENCE SpaesLab (Berlin) Artist in Residence, 2025 Toi Pōneke (Wellington) Sound Artist in Residence, 2023 International Computer Music Conference Artist talk / presentation Australasian Computer Music Conference Artist talk / presentation Selected Works Breathwork – Toi Pōneke Gallery (2024) Immersive spatial audio installation Mutuals – Related Articles (2024) Ambisonic composition

"Merging Open and Closed World" is a soundscape composition that explores the relationship between what we might call the closed world, the underwater world, and the open world, the world of air. Normally, we humans experience the open world, we live in it, and we often forget that there is always a submerged acoustic world at the same time. The aim of this composition is to merge these two acoustic ecosystems and create the illusion of super-hearing that transcends all boundaries.

Nicola Fumo Frattegiani

Nicola Fumo Frattegiani is an electroacoustic composer living in Perugia, Italy. His works have been presented at several prestigious national and international festivals of electroacoustic music and experimental arts. Author and performer, his research deals with electroacoustic music, sound for images, video, art exhibitions and compositions for contemporary theater. He was Subject Expert in ‘’Computer Music’’ at the Conservatory of Music in Perugia. He has held the chair of “Electroacoustic Composition” at the Conservatory of Music in Messina and the Conservatory of Music in Palermo. He was also a professor of “Sound Design” at the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata. He currently teaches “Audio & Mixing” and “Sound Space Design” at the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia and is a tenured professor of “Electroacoustic Composition” at the Conservatory of Music in Fermo.

The WIND knows no BORDERS, it cannot BE STOPPED. PEACE WIND is born from the sound of a WIND, the same WIND that caressed my face as a child, when my SOUL was still INNOCENT, when my SOUL didn't yet know to BE. I entrusted MUSIC with the task of making the WIND SPEAK—or rather, making it SING words of PEACE, but in an UNHEARD OF and INAUDIBLE language, intelligible only to the most intimate and profound part of our BEING, thus hoping that our SOUL, finally FREE, can let itself be moved and transported to an IDEAL WORLD, where the condition of NORMALITY is PEACE, where the only IMAGINABLE WAR is the one for PEACE. PEACE does not SHOUT. PEACE WIND: WIND of PEACE, PEACE in the WIND.

Domenico De Simone

Professor of Electroacoustic Composition at the "Umberto Giordano" Music Conservatory of Foggia. Graduated in Composition, Electronic Music, Piano and Jazz. He also graduated in Composition advanced course at the Accademia Nazionale of Santa Cecilia under the guidance of Azio Corghi and in Electronic Music - 2nd academic level, with the highest marks and honors, at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia under the guidance of Giorgio Nottoli. He enhanced his knowledge by attending the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, where he was awarded with the diploma of merit in Music for Film by Ennio Morricone and the diploma of merit in Composition by Franco Donatoni. His compositions have been performed in more than one hundred concerts in Italy and abroad (China, Latvia, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Romania, Malta, USA, Ireland, UK, Spain, Austria, Brazil, France, Ecuador, Australia, Poland, Germany, South Korea, Portugal, Peru, Thailand, Switzerland, Ukraine, Netherlands, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, Mexico, etc).