How to live together in sound?
Towards sonic democracy

Abstract

In this presentation we describe an artistic research approach investigating listening habits and the articulation abilities of lay person encountered in public spaces in an urban context. Setting up a ‘listening observatory’ , passersby are invited to listen through headphones to the sounds of an environment as captured by a surround microphone. Two artistic researchers carry out this fieldwork, enabling encounters as well as documenting in media and text their experiences. Based on these materials comprising fragments of conversations between the artist-researchers and reported exchanges, the topics of social interaction, performing listening in public space, attention and sonic and aural identification enabled by this situation are explored. The discussion extends to notion of social interactions and underlying principles and phases, and how shared listening can function as a conduit for relating to one another in a sonic and aural encounter.

Jan Schacher

Jan Schacher is an artist-researcher and educator performing on stage and other environments, working with and through sound, body, and presence. In his practice, he investigates how the musician's body establishes and grounds the intertwined relationship between perception, musical actions, and the intangible presence of sound. His pieces and perfromances have been situated in such diverse contexts as media festivals, improv music gigs, intercultural social projects, and sound art investigations in urban space. In parallel to his artist practice, he was an associate researcher at the Zurich University of the Arts, and since 2021 has been Professor of Music and Technology at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts in Helsinki.

João Luís Lopes Montes

João Luís is a percussionist and interdisciplinary artist based in Helsinki. His practice operates at the intersection of performance, education, and community-led projects, with a particular focus on rhythm, soundscapes, and collaborative creation. Over the past decade, he has developed a signature style that combines multi-percussion, electroacoustic experimentation, and movement-driven performance.
Alongside his creative work, João has extensive experience leading artistic processes with youth and intergenerational groups, ranging from long-term ensemble teaching to international community workshops in South America. His career encompasses touring projects for young audiences, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and the ongoing development of new solo and ensemble work. He currently balances his artistic practice with teaching and research, exploring how sound, improvisation, and collective creativity shape contemporary performance environments.

Devina Boughton

Devina Boughton is a trumpet player, vocalist, composer, conductor and arranger, as well as a curator and pedagogue working in transcultural, intermedial, and interdisciplinary collaborations, as well as in art-science and artistic research projects. Their work with musical performance expands into working with(in) marine ecosystems exploring connections with shepherd's horns, algae (microalgae and horns made from bull kelp), and cultural heritage, with a focus on agency, creating connections, and engaging with communities. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, their career has brought them to Finland to work within a thriving environment of music and arts-science collaborations.

Abstract

During the outdoor walk we investigate what do we sense while taking a walk in the twilight around a body of water in the middle of Helsinki.

The walk goes around Töölönlahti, a water near by symposium site. The intention is to identify smells, sounds, visual observations that are caused by living beings that can be seen or whose existence can be detected by senses. The participants get notebooks and pens for making notes (visual or written). In the end of the walk the participants are asked to write a letter to their non-human companions or to the dog Lääb or the horse Domino who both have been participants in the module “Voicing (to) the Other” of the project “How to live together in sound? Towards sonic democracy”.

Abstract

Voicing (to) the Other is a project by Angela Bartram and Jaana Erkkilä-Hill that investigates multispecies communication through an expanded artistic research methodology situated within visual culture and critical animal studies. Centred on the audiovisual and textual documentation translations of spaces of belonging and dislocation together with writing and reading letters to two non-human companions, the project develops a durational practice grounded in attentiveness, care, and animal attentive relational ethics. Through handwritten correspondence, spoken voice, video imagining and installation, and participatory engagement, the research explores how longing (from a human perspective), collaboration, and language can make fluid the often too-rigid boundaries between species. Rather than seeking empirical confirmation of interspecies inclusion, the work cultivates speculative conditions for coexistence, foregrounding modes of communication that exceed linguistic and representational frameworks. The resulting dual-screen installation and audience-driven letter exchange offer artistic practice as a conceptual and affective space in which interspecies encounters may be critically examined, gently held, and imaginatively extended.

Jaana Erkkilä-Hill

Jaana Erkkilä-Hill is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Lapland. Her more than thirty years of artistic work consists of works realized with different methods of printmaking and installations. Woodcuts and linocuts are central to Erkkilä's work, and the knowledge of the hand, the feel of the material are important elements for her during the working process. Her practice explores relational and participatory approaches to art-making, often focusing on care, communication, and human–animal relationships within contemporary artistic research.

Erkkilä-Hill has been teaching visual arts since her student years. In recent years, she has focused her research activities especially on artist pedagogy. She investigates how artists who are actively engaged in their own artistic work teach art, and how the experiential knowledge related to the teacher's own artistic work is transferred by the students to their own growth platform.

Angela Bartram

Angela Bartram is an artist, artistic researcher, and academic who investigates thresholds of the human body, gallery or museum, definitions of the human and animal as companion species and strategies for documenting the ephemeral. The research, engaged individually and through collaboration, is made public through exhibitions, events, and published texts. Bartram is Professor of Contemporary Art and Co-Lead for the Creative and Cultural Industries Academic Theme and Research Centre at the University of Derby. Amongst other board affiliations she is Trustee of the Board of Directors of the Live Art Development Agency and has served as Vice President and Executive Board member of the Society for Artistic Research. Her PhD in Fine Art and Visual Culture is from Middlesex University.

Abstract

How can a sonic artist or musician produce a performance in a shared acoustic space without disturbing the acoustic balance of natural sounds? This presentation shares the results of how the artistic method called Nichephony was implemented. Fieldwork begins by first listening to the environment and grouping the sounds in it into three categories, as well as taking into account the cyclical nature of recurring sound events (such as birdsong). These categories are biophony (biological sounds), geophony (non-biological sounds) and anthropophony (sounds produced by humans).

The musician decides which sounds and sound frequency bands s-/he will focus on in her/his playing and joins in with her/his sounds. When the musician joins in with sound processes, it is important to listen to the rhythm of the sound events and find a place for her/his own sounds, that is, to adapt her/his playing to other sound events in the soundscape.

Only after analyzing the characteristics of the sound environment can the musician join in so that s-/he does not disturb the natural sound processes and the acoustic balance of the environment. The Nichephony method is not about the musician going into nature to play any standard music for herself/himself or other people, and the sounds of nature would be the background, the sound wallpaper of her/his playing. The musician is basically just a visitor in the natural sound environment, and therefore s-/he must adapt her/his playing to the environment. Otherwise, s-/he would dominate the balance of nature and that is against the idea of Nichephony. The artist also has to give up her/his own intention so that s-/he can quiet down and listen to the sound events of the environment while playing. In practice, s-/he listens more than plays the instrument. Only through analytical listening can the musician discover the characteristics of the vocalizing taxa in the natural environment, to which s-/he can react and adapt with her/his playing.

Human music is built as a linear, continuous series of sounds. Animals, on the other hand, do not vocalize all the time, the sound events they produce are punctual, because they listen to each other and the environment. Therefore, the musician should adapt to the model of nature so that s-/he does not disrupt the balance of the biophonic sounds of the environment with odd sound material and playing strategies that are completely foreign to nature. Based on my experiences from fieldwork, I believe that the Nichephony method can produce environmentally friendly music, and entice the birds to react by singing. Although this very silent and minimal music differs from what we humans are used to considering as music.

Petri Kuljuntausta

Petri Kuljuntausta is a composer, improviser, musician, and sonic artist. He has performed music for an underwater audience, improvised with birds, and made music from whale calls and the sounds of the northern lights. In addition to using environmental sounds and live electronics in his work, he creates sound installations for galleries, museums, public spaces, nature environments and culture centres (eg. permanent installation ‘Tempus’ in Musiikkitalo, commissioned by State Art Deposit Collection). He was awarded the ‘State Prize for the Arts’ by Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike). Kuljuntausta has published three books on electronic music and sound art. Over 130 electroacoustic compositions and sound works by Kuljuntausta has been published on various record labels in Europe, Australia, India, and the USA. He has worked as a record producer and peer reviewer (eg. MIT Press). Kuljuntausta is Adjunct Professor (Docent) of Sound Art and Electronic Music and a visiting lecturer at the University of the Arts Helsinki and Aalto University Espoo.

Dario Martinelli

Dario Martinelli is a Full Professor in History and Theory of Arts at Kaunas University of Technology, Adjunct Professor in Semiotics and Musicology at the University of Helsinki and Adjunct Professor in Semiotics and Communication Studies at Lapland University. As of 2026, he has published 20 authored monographs and ca. 200 among edited collections, studies and scientific articles. Martinelli is also active as composer and producer.

John Richardson

John Richardson is Professor of Musicology at the University of Turku and PI of the Research Council of Finland project Transnational and Ecological Perspectives on Nordic Soundtracks. His research spans contemporary music, audiovisual media, cultural musicology and issues like gender studies, studies of music production, and ecocriticism. Publications include the books, An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal, Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, and numerous edited collections, including The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, Einstein on the Beach: Opera Beyond Drama, Nordic Music Videos and Soundtracks of Climate Change. Richardson is additionally an active recording artist and music producer.

Abstract

This presentation addresses “togetherness” from the perspective that opens up the concept of “common self”. Drawing on the notion of “participatory sense making” (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007) and a specific critic of individualism and its derivate participation (Garcés 2013) a “common self” implies a variety of togetherness that emerges spontaneously out of sustained interactions between individual selves and their surroundings, and constitute a supra-individual autonomous system that as such enacts its own sense. The practices in focus of this presentation—sensitive practices of reflective co-involvement—accomplish two functions in relation to the common self: first, to create conditions for its emergence, and second to reflect (meaning here to bring to expression in another medium) the sense it enacts.
The presentation will begin by a collective live inquiry carried out by Alex Arteaga, Riina Hannuksela, and Igor Lora Romero, followed by an explanation of the concepts that this artistic research contribute to generate, a response by Laura Mojica, and an open dialogue with all attendees.

Alex Arteaga

Alex Arteaga is a transdisciplinary artist-researcher who combines and hybridizes sensitive, phenomenological and enactivist research practices through an inquiry into embodiments, environments and epistemologies. He develops long-term artistic research projects such as Architecture of Embodiment, Contingent Agencies, or Thinking Aesthetic Thinking through Aesthetic Research Practices. Currently he is a grant-funded researcher at the Research Institute of the University of the Arts Helsinki.

Riina Hannuksela

Riina Hannuksela is a doctoral researcher and dance artist working at the intersection of dance and critical disability studies. Her artistic research explores how intellectual disability can function as a critical method of exposing and disrupting ableist assumptions about embodied knowledge in Western theatre dance. The research is conducted through long-term co-creative choreographic practice with Ihanat Company, which is a professional dance company of dancers with and without intellectual disabilities. She has worked extensively as a community artist, choreographer, and dance pedagogue for almost two decades. Throughout her career, she has been drawn to practices that challenge who gets recognised as a valid contributor of artistic knowledge in dance and the performing arts, whether as a creator, a collaborator, or an artist.

Igor Lora Romero

Igor Lora Romero is a painter and student of the master’s in fine arts in the University of the Arts Helsinki. Inspired by introspection and concerns from everyday life, his works are heavily influenced by sociology, psychology and philosophy, covering a range of topics such as identity, phenomenology or perfection. His latest projects reflect on the concepts of rest and productivity, which he explores through a series of figurative paintings and handmade miniatures.

Laura Mojica

Laura Mojica is a philosopher of cognitive science working mainly within enactive and 4E approaches to cognition. Her research has contributed to debates on normativity, agency, and situated cognition. Her current work shows that material environments do not simply support human action but help constitute the agents that we are. She is also interested in the intersection between artistic practices and the ontology of agents and their environments.