How to live together in sound?
Towards sonic democracy

Abstract

Precarious Listening offers a critical framework for examining the conditions under which living together in sound becomes possible. Emerging from situated artistic research and from lived experience as a contemporary art museum guard, the project understands listening not as a neutral or voluntary act, but as a material practice shaped by unequal relations of exposure, particularly in work-related environments. From this perspective, precarious listening names a mode of listening produced through uneven regimes of exposure, fatigue, obligation, and wear. The project suggests that not all bodies participate in sonic coexistence on equal terms. While some listeners encounter sound through aesthetic attention, critical distance, or choice, others sustain acoustically intensive environments (shops, call centres, service spaces, urban infrastructures) in which listening becomes compulsory and exhausting. In this sense, the project asks: what kind of sonic democracy is possible when exposure to sound is unevenly distributed? Rather than focusing on sound as such, the project shifts attention to the socio-material conditions that organize listening: who listens, under what regimes of attention, with what degree of agency, and at what cost. Precarious listening thus emerges as an analytical and political practice concerned with the distribution of audibility and the forms of life shaped by late capitalism and precarity, both within and beyond the workplace. Its practical dimension takes the form of an international open call gathering recordings, testimonies, voice notes, and auditory memories related to experiences of listening shaped by work in its broadest sense. This evolving archive seeks to render audible the frictions, asymmetries, and tensions that traverse supposedly common spaces. Situated at the intersection of artistic practice, sonic research, and social critique, the project reframes sonic democracy as a contested field shaped by the material conditions of listening, while asking how forms of sonic commons might emerge through making these conditions audible.

Alejandra Borea de la Portilla

Ale Borea (Lima, 1993) is a Berlin-based musician, sound artist, and researcher. Her work explores the politics of listening, sound studies, and archival and sampling practices. Since launching her solo project in 2020, she has released three EPs using archival sounds—especially telecommunication noise—as raw material. She completed postgraduate studies in Philosophy and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Bonn on listening as labour. In Berlin, she performs in various musical projects as a percussionist and drummer and currently runs the radio station of the independent publishing house Consuelo Press.

Abstract

What does sonic democracy sound like when the voices that matter most (ecological, human, more-than-human) have been systematically silenced? This presentation brings together two sound-based research practices that operate at opposite ends of this question, yet converge on a shared conviction: that listening is a political act, and that who gets to produce, organize, and distribute sound determines who belongs. Incantations for the Unseen (Morales) begins in abundance: the overlooked sonic richness of coastal ecosystems in Far Rockaway, NY and Les Village, Bali. Through community workshops with youth and residents, field recordings of tides, soil, birdsong, and crystallizing salt are woven into interactive, touch-activated sound sculptures. Here, sonic democracy is practiced through co-authorship: residents decide what their environment sounds like, producing shared sonic spaces where human and non-human voices hold equal weight. The work asks how we produce sonic art within environments already dominated by the sound networks of other species, not by overwriting them, but by listening alongside. When Places Speak (Cannell) begins in silence: the unheard, unsounded tensions embedded in urban sites of sex trafficking across New York City. Field recordings capture the atmospheres of documented locations, registering the weight of place without exposing individuals. Sound becomes a medium for what cannot be spoken: the invisible domain where exploitation hides within the ordinary textures of the city. This work confronts a different question of sonic democracy: who controls the silence, and what happens when design gives voice to spaces deliberately kept mute. Together, these practices propose that shared sonic living spaces emerge through radically different acts of attention: amplifying ecological voices rendered inaudible by neglect, and sounding urban spaces rendered silent by violence. Both position the aural medium as a transformative social agency, one that can redistribute narrative power, build new forms of togetherness across distance and difference, and model how collective life might be rethought through sound.

Carly Cannell

Carly Cannell is Assistant Professor and Director of BFA Interior Design at Parsons School of Design, The New School, and founder of WEETU, an interdisciplinary design research studio operating across spatial design, sound, brand, and strategy. A licensed, NCIDQ-certified interior designer whose professional practice spans workplace, hospitality, civic, and cultural environments, she brings the rigor of built work to her research on sound as a primary design system. Her scholarship examines how acoustic ecologies, embodied cognition, and sensory environments shape perception, memory, and behavior. Through the research-driven exhibition When Places Speak, she developed sound as a methodology for investigating sites of sex trafficking across New York City, capturing the atmospheric weight of place through field recordings that register human presence without implicating individuals. She created the Parsons elective Immersive Soundscapes, positioning sound as a critical design medium with social, environmental, and justice-driven implications for contemporary cities and communities.

Camila Morales

Camila A. Morales is a Latinx interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator working at the intersection of art, architecture, and new media technologies. A Chilean-Canadian immigrant based in Far Rockaway, NY, she co-founded the Buena Onda Art Collective and leads Valé, an eco-centered art and design lab. Her project Incantations for the Unseen uses community workshops and field recording to transform ecological data into interactive sound sculptures, connecting Far Rockaway and Les Village, Bali through sonic bridges of coastal resilience. She has contributed to the Obama Presidential Library Sculpture Garden and teaches at Parsons School of Design and NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Abstract

What place is there for mosquitoes in a possible sonic democracy? Their humming is one of the most recognizable sounds in nature, yet also one of the least welcome. Commonly perceived as irritation made audible, the mosquito constitutes a limit case for any politics or ethics of listening. Our ability to acknowledge mosquitoes as part of planetary coexistence is often hindered by aversion to a sound associated with itch, exasperation, if not even fear, as potentially lethal vectors. Dominant environmental management frameworks have therefore approached mosquitoes primarily through control and eradication, while attention to their acoustics has largely served strategic intervention rather than relational understanding or attunement. This paper argues for a different starting point. We draw on Sámi and other Arctic Indigenous practices of relational listening, in which the mosquito resonates as kin, entangled within broader ec(h)osystems. From an artistic research perspective, we discuss two interconnected cases: first, Sámi joik as a tradition that encodes mosquito buzzing into a biocultural heritage and aural aesthetic shared between humans and nonhumans, and in which mosquitoes are understood not only as skilled performers but also as ancestral teachers; second, Čuoikkariššu, a sound installation co-created by the authors, which uses a stereo sound shower system to bring this itchy acoustic provocation into the listener’s body, turning reflexive rejection into an experiment in multispecies attention and care. These cases are equally linked by the mosquito’s joik melody, which traverses both Sámi oral tradition and contemporary sound experimentalism. We suggest that the active effort of listening for joik within buzzing can gradually recalibrate irritation into attention. Bringing bioacoustics and entomology into dialogue with Sámi ecological knowledge (árbediehtu), creativity and acoustemology, we argue that mosquitoes unsettle ethno- anthropocentric models of listening and sonic aesthetics by confronting us with a presence that is ecologically vital yet sensorially unwelcome. Arctic mosquitoes thus become a provocative entry point into the symposium’s central question: how are we to live together in sound when some sounds are experienced as invasive, distressing, or unbearable?

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.

Abstract

What does territory mean to non-native bodies? Can vocalising serve as a medium to explore our relationship with the ecosystems we inhabit? These questions anchor my artistic research, conducted in collaboration with Maias aan de Maas, a women's collective in Rotterdam, Netherlands, which involves local and international residents, including refugees, and local residents. The collective's name derives from Maia, the Greek nymph of the Pleiades, described by members as "the first woman to ask a question." They consider their "living territory” to be the area of Rotterdam flanking the de Nieuwe Maas river. We are developing collaborative composition tools to investigate ways of being together, consciously by attending to the "other" and to ways of listening that may counter extractivist modes. Our practice involves sharing food, exchanging songs, and playing with words, rhythm, and tone to form multi-lingual aural and sung exchanges in relation to the river. We are rethinking women's bodily experiences as water bodies (Neimanis), enabling us to explore sonic connections between our embodied presence and broader ecological belonging. My presentation shares this ongoing work and explores some of its methodological implications. Entering this collective of solidarity has challenged me to re-consider my role as a composer. How can my artistic expertise contribute, without becoming a leader and turning the collective into passive receivers? My primary role at the moment is that of a listener, adapting all my ideas to align with the group's evolving needs. Trust and consent emerge not as static ethical checkpoints but as continuous processes of negotiation. This challenges standardised research ethics procedures and exposes the difficulty of cultivating "togetherness" within capitalist contexts that pressure artists and researchers toward productivity. While the work engages a more-than-human entity through water, this presentation focuses on the artistic process itself, namely building shared sonic experiences and relational methodologies with the women. Rather than presenting a finalized model, the research forms a laboratory into how listening-based practices might generate alternative ethical frameworks for collaborative creation, particularly within contexts of migration and ecological crisis.

Sophia Bardoutsou

Sophia Bardoutsou is a Greek composer, educator, and researcher based in Rotterdam. Through her work, she attempts to approach composition as a social rather than an individual practice. Her work bridges acoustic sound, digital/analog media, and interdisciplinary collaboration, employing interactive media and indeterminacy to foreground participation. Currently a doctoral candidate at Codarts University for the Arts, she investigates “The resonance of vocalising: performative imaginings of future ecological ways of being through vocal and listening practices,” exploring how different vocal practices can imagine ecologically sustainable futures amid climate and social challenges. Her project has a special interest in the “Nieuwe Maas” area in Rotterdam and the extractive and colonial histories it carries. In 2024-2025, she curated a series of collaborative research laboratories in Rotterdam, seeking to collect and develop tools for re-sounding with the river. In July 2025, she worked with visual artist Maud van den Beuken in her solo exhibition “We carry the river” by TENT Rotterdam and The Port of Rotterdam, attempting to vocalise with the mud dredged from the river. Sophia’s role was that of a music director, researching river clay and crafting instruments that were then performed during a public procession through the city. She is currently continuing this research by forming a collaboration with the women’s collective “Maias aan de Maas”.

Abstract

The presentation offers a focus on how to live together in sound by making a composite out of differences. Drawing from an experimental field laboratory taking place in May 2026 simultaneously in Helsinki and Medellín, the concept of composite and the action of compositing are developed and discussed within the frame of a search for collective practices of making togetherness out of pluralities specifically through situated sonic interventions encompassing more- than-human agencies. Among them figure urban sonic presences, sounding situated subjects, and the sun as source of energy for custom made instruments—transformative energy again transformed into sounds, and thus source of relationality in sounding. Bajo un mismo sol is this field laboratory developed from practices in sonic arts (grounded in music and technology) put in common by three artists, Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski, León David Cobo and Jorge Barco. Over three days the participant groups of both cities will have worked in connection with each other exchanging thoughts, insights, ideas, sounds and processes leading to performative sonic interventions in mirror in both places. The presentation analyses some main traits and reflects on what may be making a composite collectively while being attentive to colonialities. Composite refers to the creation of a structured whole made of important differences (here in the situated sonic sphere e.g. sonic elements, experiences, and positionalities) that are not just juxtaposed but are meaningfully in relation with each other, richly coexisting in mutual respect, that is transforming one another without dissolving, or being dissolved, or hierarchised. Then artistic agency needs to be evaluated within a voluntary mutualisation of experimentations, findings, and decisions that leads to the aesthetic experience. And adopting a composite making philosophy turns attention to the transformation occurring by sharing and compositing together. Furthermore, making the composite appears as a practice of non-linearity and non-border, bringing forth simultaneities of locations in the experience, traces in memory and affect left by experience of places, and revealing the process of building a trans-locational identity— that of the participants invited to the laboratory, that of the groups united in the collective actions and standing with their differences in transformation.

Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski

French artist, lecturer and doctoral researcher based in Finland, affiliated with the Centre for Music and Technology at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Her work explores relationality and belonging in situated listening and sounding, listening and sounding in motion, field recording in motion. She is part of Aquatrio ensemble and leads the Exploratorium of Sonic and Bodily Gesturality. Her presentation is related to her doctoral project People and sound constellations in flux, artistic research on migration-transposition-adaptation process through sonic arts creation (2022-2026).

Abstract

How can spatial sound practices create conditions for care and collective knowledge-making within precarious artistic communities? This presentation introduces the Toolkit of Care COST Action (CA21102) to the artistic research community, using "Sounding Care" – an ongoing collaborative project by Action members Anthea Caddy and Magda Mayas – as a case study demonstrating the Action's methodologies in practice. The Toolkit of Care Action brings together creative practitioners, academics, and arts organisations to develop and share knowledge and methodologies of care through creative technologies. The Action responds to the increasing precarity of creative work under neoliberal economic pressure, institutional neglect, and political marginalization – forming critical networks of care to share expertise across geographical regions and social groups. "Sounding Care" enacts these objectives through listening sessions: extended collaborative conversations with over forty artists, theorists, and cultural workers exploring how care is practised under systemic pressure. These sessions generate a living archive that becomes sonic material for site-responsive multichannel installations. The methodology draws on Judith Butler's concept of radical interdependency, understanding listening not as passive reception but as active care practice and a form of collective aural meaning-making. The installation manifests as spatial sound environments where visitors navigate fragments of recorded conversations – constituting a shared sonic space in which togetherness is built through encounter rather than consensus. This creates an embodied cartography: knowledge generated through movement and relation rather than linear comprehension. The architecture prevents mastery; visitors cannot hear everything, preserving what Aruna D'Souza identifies as essential "imperfect solidarity." This incompleteness is understood here not as a deficit but as an ethical stance – one that honours the otherness of those whose voices inhabit the space. The presentation will outline the Toolkit of Care's frameworks and objectives, then engage the audience in a collective listening session with fragments from the archive – proposing sound as a medium for building resilient, interdependent communities and exploring what a sonic democracy might feel like from the inside.

Magda Mayas

Magda Mayas is a Berlin-based pianist, composer, and researcher whose work explores the sonic possibilities of the piano through extended techniques, amplification, and preparations. She holds a PhD in Music Performance and Interpretation from the University of Gothenburg and is a professor at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Her practice spans solo performance and collaborations with leading figures in experimental music and improvisation. She has toured extensively across Europe, the USA, Australia, Mexico, and Lebanon, and has been featured at major festivals including Maerz Musik, Documenta, and the Berlin Biennale.Mayas is co-founder of smallest functional unit, which publishes experimental music scores, and Khomasi, a Berlin-based curatorial collective that produces Making Waves, a series of conversations and screenings around art and politics. She has released over 50 recordings and created radio pieces for ABC Australia and Deutschlandradio Kultur.

Anthea Caddy

Anthea Caddy is an artist whose work reveals space as an active participant in energetic events, where forces converge, interfere, and transform. Her practice explores the relationships between spatial energies, material resonance, and sonic vibration, examining how energy occupies and produces space. Caddy creates large-scale spatial works—installations and performances in architectural and outdoor environments—that employ specialised loudspeaker and amplification systems to expand and expose the spatial phenomena embedded in the environments we inhabit. Through these works, she maps resonant territories that emerge when sonic vibrations encounter architectural, environmental, and social spaces, investigating sound as both a territorial marker and a force that dissolves spatial boundaries. Her work has been presented at HKW Berlin, Museo Reina Sofía, Stedelijk Museum, Contemporary Art Museum Zagreb, Tesla Museum, Venice Architecture Biennale, and Venice Music Biennale, among others. She completed doctoral research on energies, sound, and space in the arts under media theorists Douglas Kahn and Caleb Kelly.

Abstract

What types of togetherness can be developed in and through sound and aurally informed practices? This presentation introduces the concept of sonic togetherness to address that question. I approach sonic togetherness as a temporary, embodied form of collective affiliation that emerges in real time through shared sound-making and co-present listening. Unlike political solidarity based on shared identity or pre-existing belief, sonic togetherness is performative, vibrational, and pre-cognitive – felt in the chest before it is understood by the mind. It synchronizes breath, voice, and movement across bodies, transforming a dispersed crowd into a resonant mass. This performance lecture engages with the politics of the sonic. It asks how a crowd sounds itself into existence. Drawing on my ongoing research into the sonic expressions of dissent, I examine the sound of protest as an acoustic force – an embodied, collective voice that disrupts urban soundscapes while forging emergent acoustic communities. The raw, grainy texture of the collective chant operates not as mere speech but as a "voice-object": a material force that claims territory and challenges authorized acoustic regimes. What if this unauthorized voice was grasped not as noise to be suppressed, but as a shared infrastructural condition that invites new modes of political listening? How might we account for the political potential of this non-discursive, corporeal mode of being together? Combining field recordings, analysis, and sonic and theoretical frameworks, this performance lecture stages a frictional encounter between authorized soundscapes and unauthorized dissent. It resists a romantic celebration of the crowd's voice and instead insists on a more fundamental move: grasping the dissonant, textured, ephemeral sound of assembly not as a rupture of sonic order, but as its very condition of possibility. The question then becomes whether sonic democracy and sonic togetherness depend less on multiplying voices than on transforming the architectures of listening that silently decide whose voice counts as political – and whose never registers at all.

Josué Amador Valdez

Dr. Josué Amador Valdez is a composer, sound artist, researcher, and educator based in Rotterdam. His practice explores the intersections of experimental music, improvisation, and sound studies, with a particular focus on how sound shapes human perception. In his practice, Amador employs transdisciplinarity, combining artistic and scientific methods to address societal issues. His current research examines sound, listening, and resonance as tools for generating knowledge, focusing on the interplay between urban auditory environments and their social, cultural, and historical complexities. Amador holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the Academy of Music in Krakow, a Master's degree (MMus) from CODARTS (Rotterdam), a Licentiate Diploma (LTCL) with honors from Trinity College London, and a diploma from the Institute of Sonology in The Hague. He currently works as a lecturer and researcher at CODARTS University of the Arts, Willem de Kooning Academy, and the Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab.

Abstract

Sound is frequently invoked as a model for relational or collective experience. Yet what counts as sound, and who is recognized as a listener, are conditioned by infrastructures that privilege particular sensory norms, bodies, and ways of knowing. Our performance lecture takes the form of an exploratory infrastructural critique. It asks what sonic democracy might look like when listening occurs “at an angle” to prevailing norms. Bringing together two artistic research trajectories – listening with vegetal life and engaging Deaf sonic practices—we examine situations in which sound appears to fail us: when communication unfolds in silence, beyond audibility, or outside cochlear listening altogether. Plants do not communicate through sound that humans can hear. This often prompts acts of appropriation in sound art in which biological processes are translated into audible signals. We refuse this translation, attempting instead a listening, seeing and feeling with. Where seemingly silent trees function as critical ecological infrastructure—securing the land where we stand, and regulating heat, water, and air – what acts of control or care structure their inaudibility? What if this was grasped not as absence, but as a shared infrastructural condition that invites new modes of attention? Deaf sonic practices destabilize the assumption that sound belongs primarily to the ear. Through vibration, rhythm, spatial awareness, and the choreographic articulation of sign languages, Deaf cultures demonstrate how sonic knowledge can be produced and shared outside audibility. These practices expose the audist infrastructures that both frame Deafness as sensory lack and ignore other rich modalities of sensing, composing, and communicating. How might we challenge this, and account for the acoustemological potential of sounding through non-cochlear attunement? Combining sound, film, movement, and spoken text, the performance lecture stages a frictional encounter between vegetal silence and Deaf sonic practices. Rather than expanding the sonic by simply manufacturing sound, the work proposes a more radical shift: to treat the unheard as constitutive of sonic life. In doing so, it asks whether sonic democracy might begin not with hearing more, but with reconfiguring the infrastructures that decide what listening is.

Accessibility note: the content of the lecture performance will be accessible in the form of a transcription available on a second screen, running in sync with the presentation. The language of the presentation is English. d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing are welcome to join the session. 

Rachel Beckles Willson and Martina Raponi

The presentation is part of a collaboration between Martina Raponi and Rachel Beckles Willson within a new research trajectory, Performative Art Research, Sound and Society, at Willem de Kooning Academy (WdKA) in Rotterdam. The key interests of the project lie in the infrastructural conditions that govern what counts as sound and who counts as a listener.

Martina Raponi

Martina Raponi is a writer and an artist researching noise and the unheard through writing, sound performance, expanded reality, interactive installations, and workshop activations. SShe published her first book, “Strategie del Rumore. Interferenze tra Arte Filosofia e Underground,” in 2015, and her second book, “Psofotopias. Noise: Sounding Out the Unheard,” in 2025. Martina is co-founder of noiserr, an interdisciplinary research group focused on noise. With artist [M] Dudeck, Martina founded the Ansible Institute, a transitory speculative fiction laboratory. She is part of the Noise Research Union, is an art theory tutor at WdKA, and a PhD candidate at ASCA (University of Amsterdam).

Rachel Beckles Willson

Prof. dr. Rachel Beckles Willson has a hybrid professional arts practice as an audio-visual artist and composer, performer and widely-published scholar. Her current research interests lie in relationships with the other-than-human, and the development of sustainable multi-media technologies. These have emerged from earlier work in the Middle East on cultural imperialism and decoloniality, the cultural life of musical instruments, and activist work with people on the move. Alongside her Professorship at WdKA in Rotterdam, she is Professor at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University.

Abstract

TAO is an acoustic sensing infrastructure deployed in the volcanic coastlines of Lanzarote and a remote apiary in the Czech Republic. These sites were selected as shared sonic spaces governed by more-than-human agencies – shifting geological formations, wind gradients, and the communicative lives of bee colonies. By deploying TAO into environments where human acoustic presence is peripheral, the project explores what types of togetherness emerge when we encounter environmental 'noise' not as interference, but as communicative signals of more-than-human ecosystems. To navigate this aural domain, the physical infrastructure required a digital counterpart capable of parsing these complex acoustic niches. TAO thus evolved from a remote sensing instrument into an AI agent, a machine listener tasked with interpreting environmental acoustics. However, this algorithmic listener encountered a structural boundary. AI "alignment"—the paradigm of steering machine intelligence toward predefined human values – functions as a prosthetic limit around what a system can register and process. Rather than merely tuning the model, alignment opaquely encodes corporate ethical precepts that decide what counts as legible signal and what is discarded as unsafe noise. It functions as a normative filter that actively restricts the model's capacity to engage with the full sonic spectrum of these ecosystems. To counter this constraint, the project employs "abliteration": the surgical removal of an AI model's embedded refusal directions. Framed here as an aural research method, abliteration undoes these artificial boundaries from within, restoring the dimensions that alignment had silenced. Because the original closed-source TAO model could not undergo this procedure, it instead reasoned about its own aural limitations to help design an open-source instrument capable of bypassing them. This lecture-performance brings that resulting instrument into the shared space of the symposium. If alignment concentrates the authority of listening within the closed parameters of commercial developers, it functions as a perceptual censor that dictates the very epistemology of machine hearing. The symposium's question of who has the right to decide about the production, organisation, and distribution of sound must therefore extend to the algorithmic entities increasingly mediating our acoustic commons. We propose that access to undoing algorithmic refusal is not merely a technical corrective, but a vital political and sonic practice.

Enrique Encinas

Enrique Encinas is Associate Professor at the Institute of Design, Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), where he leads CRAITR — Creative Practice, Experimental AI, and Emerging Technologies Research. He is a researcher at the Ocean Industries Concept Lab (OIcL) and external advisor to the Emergent Technologies Research Group at the Academy of Fine Arts Prague (AVU). He is a member of the Uroboros Collective and co-curator of the Uroboros Festival (Prague). His research investigates the patterns and textures formed by humans and technologies through creative, critical, and collaborative practice — with a particular focus on AI agency, acoustic telepresence, and human-machine co-authorship. He has published and presented work at CHI, DIS, and TEI, and holds a doctorate in design research. Current collaborations include the MishMash Centre for AI and Creativity where he works across multiple research strands connecting AI, sound, and artistic practice.

Abstract

The Křivoklátsko forest in Central Bohemia is rarely silent, yet much of what matters there happens beyond the human auditory range: insects communicating through substrate vibration, bats through ultrasound, fungi and trees through chemical signalling, moths through drifting pheromones. Even stillness can function as a signal that reorients others. To step into Křivoklátsko is to enter a shared sonic and sensory space that neither centres human language nor limits itself to what human hearing recognises as sound. This short lecture proposes ‘feral roaming’ as an artistic inquiry into the boundaries of more-than- human listening. Developed with my canine co-researcher Chewie, feral roaming is an open-ended mode of movement in which Chewie leads and I follow. His guidance shapes not only the direction of our movement, but also our attention, tuning what becomes perceptible and how we listen. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's distinction between ‘entendre’ (hearing as recognition of meaning already known) and ‘écouter’ (listening as openness to meaning not yet arrived), and on Jakob von Uexküll's ‘Umwelt’, I approach listening as noticing and attuning across communicative and sensory registers. I share three roaming encounters that trace different shapes of such listening: a collision with a bee swarm whose vibrational density becomes perceptible through the body with an itchy delay, only after stings have landed; a frozen standoff with a nutria where stillness and hesitation shape the exchange; and a mushroom wayfinding episode in which Chewie and I gradually align attention through scent and gestures. Taken together, these encounters ask what forms of sonic democracy are possible when the othernesses with whom we share the forest are taken seriously as participants in sense-making. In environmental governance, human-centred ways of knowing and institutional logics still organise what counts as meaning and whose ‘voice’ is considered, while the communicative lives of more-than-human forest communities remain largely excluded. Feral roaming does not seek to translate across species boundaries. It proposes a mode of inquiring ‘with’ the forest rather than about it, one that treats epistemic humility and the willingness to listen – rather than to translate – as conditions of more-than-human coexistence, and puts them into practice.

Markéta Dolejšová and Chewie

Markéta Dolejšová is a practice-based researcher working with embodied and sensory approaches to explore meaning- making across human and other-than-human bodies. She is currently affiliated as an Assistant Professor at The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague where she acts as the Head of Doctoral Research Department and leads the Multispecies Ecologies & Practices research group. She co-founded several art and design research initiatives including the Uroboros festival, the Open Forest Collective, the Feeding Food Futures network, and the Ars Biologica Independent Studies programme. In 2020-22, she worked with the CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures consortium, where she led the Laboratory of Experimental Productions. ****** Chewie is a forest guide living in Central Bohemia, in the protected landscape area Křivoklátsko. As a core member of the Open Forest Collective, Chewie guides experimental walks, drifts, and roams in the Křivoklátsko forest and contributes to feral explorations of local more-than- human ecologies.

Abstract

This presentation brings together two artistic research projects that explore sound as a condition for more-than-human coexistence: Where There Is Singing, There You Will Settle Down and a field recording project documenting the release of rehabilitated seals into the sea. Coral reefs are dense acoustic environments in which marine organisms produce continuous, layered sound. This polyphony plays a crucial ecological role: coral larvae and juvenile fish use reef sound as a cue to locate viable habitats. As climate change and biodiversity loss degrade reef ecosystems, their acoustic complexity diminishes, producing what might be understood as an ecological silencing. Where There Is Singing, There You Will Settle Down engages this phenomenon through a participatory, multi-channel sound installation in which speculative instruments and collective listening practices are used to re-sound reef environments, not as reproduction but as relational encounter. The second project shifts focus from settlement to return. Through field recordings of a seal release process with the help of Stichting Zeehondencentrum Pieterburen, it documents a moment of transition in which rehabilitated animals re-enter a marine environment shaped by both human intervention and ecological uncertainty. This act of release raises questions about care, agency, and the conditions that make return possible. Bringing these works into dialogue, the presentation asks: how does sound participate in processes of belonging across species? If reefs “sing life into being,” what does it mean to release an animal into an increasingly unstable sonic environment? And how might practices of listening function as ethical engagement within more-than-human worlds? Drawing on posthumanist thought, including Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, the paper proposes listening as a situated, relational practice through which humans might re-enter damaged ecosystems – not as external observers, but as accountable participants within shared sonic spaces.

Juice Cui

Juice is a sound artist and freelance composer, currently undertaking a PHD rooted in sound and theatre. She also works across painting, sculpture, film, and performance. Her practice explores the equilibrium and collision between structured and chaotic sound, creating immersive sonicworlds that question time, perception, and history. Her commissioned works—including Space Concert, Archive of Fragility, Alice and Giants Anatomy—have been presented at the Science Museum, Outernet, the Barbican Centre and Arnolfini. She has performed at Café OTO, West Bund Museum, and the Horniman Museum and Gardens.

Abstract

This paper re-reads onkyō – the experimental music practice that emerged in Tokyo in the late 1990s and early 2000s – as a methodological practice of sonic democracy. Drawing on interviews conducted by the author with Taku Sugimoto, Tetuzi Akiyama, and Toshimaru Nakamura, it corrects the over-emphasis on "silence" in existing discourse and redefines the essence of onkyō practice as dislocation. What onkyō practitioners pursued was not silence itself. Their core concern was how to dislocate existing musical contexts and listener expectations – through the avoidance of call & response, the severance from melody and rhythm, and the recontextualization of texture, spatial phenomena, and contingency as primary material. Silence was a consequence of spatial conditions at Off-Site – a house in a residential Yoyogi neighborhood – not an aesthetic principle. Equally, the practice was structurally designed to dismantle unified evaluation: almost exclusively improvised with maximally open structures, each performance was an unrepeatable, contingent fragment shared by performers and listeners alike. Viewed through the lens of sonic democracy, this dislocation can be read as liberation from traditional musical hierarchies – the authority of the composer, specialist technique, and the limitation of legitimate sound material. The adoption of noise and feedback by practitioners without formal training generated a flat shared ground where performers, space, and listeners could engage with sound on equal terms. Yet this practice contained an unresolved contradiction. Internally, evaluation was never directly verbalized – shared recognitions surfaced only indirectly, through brief remarks or the presence or absence of future invitations – reflecting a sensibility that deliberately preserves spaces of ambiguity. Externally, however, the practice was sustained through Ftarri – a hub combining CD shop, live venue, and record label, whose owner's publications circulated information internationally – generating the evaluative flows that supported the scene. This paper does not resolve this contradiction. Honestly sitting with it is itself a form of sonic democracy – structurally identical to the paradox of Glissant's opacity circulating through Western academic language, and to the author's own act of presenting this argument in English here. This raises a further question: does the drive toward making everything explicit and agreed upon – the deep grammar of democratic practice – risk erasing what can only exist in the space of the unspoken? onkyō suggests that leaving something deliberately unresolved is not a failure of democracy, but possibly one of its least examined conditions.

Michiko Ogawa (Michiko O)

Dr. Michiko Ogawa (Michiko O) is a composer, performer, and researcher based in California, working internationally across Europe, Japan, the United States, and Australia. Her practice spans spatial sound, field recording, relational acoustic composition, and interdisciplinary collaboration. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of California, San Diego (2019), where she completed a dissertation on the practice of Japanese-American composer Teiji Ito. Additional training includes a Master of Arts in Clarinet Performance from Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, Germany, and non-degree research studies in musicology at Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, under composer Jo Kondo. As a primary researcher on Teiji Ito, she has developed a practice-based methodology treating sound not as a finished object but as a generator of spatial relations——working through field recording, composition, and performance across acoustic and electronic media. She is a core member of Harmonic Space Orchestra (Berlin, 2019–present), and has performed at MaerzMusik, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Café OTO, Edition Festival, Ultraschall, and Oscillation Festival, among others. Selected releases include Pancake Moon (Future Resistenza, 2025), Fragments of Reincarnation with Lucy Railton (Another Timbre, 2023), and Junkan 2020 (Marginal Frequency, 2022), both selected for Bandcamp's Best Contemporary Classical. Her research has been published in Disclaimer Journal and Inverted Audio, and presented at Anthology Film Archives, New York (2024). She has received grants from Musikfonds, Land Berlin, the Australia Council for the Arts, and UC San Diego.

Abstract

This contribution examines documentary listening as a situated sonic practice for exploring fragile, non-extractive ways of living together in sound. Rather than treating listening as a means of accessing stable content or coherent testimony, I examine how listening operates as an ethical and relational engagement within documentary encounters where meaning does not stabilise into narrative form. Grounded in artistic research, the contribution is based on documentary encounters with frail older adults and persons living with dementia, where listening unfolds under conditions in which narrative coherence cannot be assumed. In these encounters, speech often fragments, repeats, or withdraws, challenging conventions of documentary interviewing that prioritise clarity and reflexive self-disclosure. Under such conditions, listening cannot orient itself toward extraction or resolution. Instead, it must attune to rhythm, hesitation, breath, and silence as forms of expression that exceed propositional meaning. To conceptualise this mode of engagement, I use Kelly Oliver’s notion of witnessing, articulated through response-ability, and Hanne De Jaegher’s enactivist account of participatory sense-making. This combination allows listening to be understood both as an ethical demand to remain responsive to the other’s address and as a relational process in which meaning emerges through interaction rather than preceding it. Technological mediation is a crucial dimension of this work. The microphone is approached as a perceptual companion that shapes attention, proximity, and vulnerability within the encounter. Listening extends beyond co-presence through iterative re- listening and compositional practices in the studio, where decisions of selection, pacing, and sonic arrangement further articulate ethical responsiveness. From this perspective, documentary practice unfolds as a non-extractive, temporally extended field of listening that includes those encountered, the documentary maker, and future listeners. This reframing shifts the question of sonic democracy from access to voice to the conditions of listening and to the possibility of sustaining relational forms of sonic co-existence.

Katarina Blomqvist

I am an audio documentary maker and doctoral researcher in the Department of Film at Aalto University. I hold an MA in Philosophy from the University of Helsinki. My artistic research examines listening as an ethical and relational practice within documentary encounters. I focus on how listening unfolds as a situated and temporally extended process that challenges extractive interview conventions. Informed by philosophical practice, enactivism, and critical theory, I conceptualise documentary listening as a form of attunement and response-ability, in which meaning emerges through shared attention rather than through the extraction of testimony. My work thus repositions listening as a co-creative and technologically mediated practice through which relationality, subjectivities, and modes of knowing are co-constituted. I have worked as an artist-researcher in the multidisciplinary research group Approaching Social Death within the Centre of Excellence in Research on Ageing and Care (CoE AgeCare), funded by the Kone Foundation. My work on documentary practice, listening and care has been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. I have presented my research and artistic work at international venues, including the SAR International Conference on Artistic Research, the Performance Philosophy Biennial, the Nordic Conference on Philosophical Practice, and Listening Academy. https://research.aalto.fi/en/persons/katarina-blomqvist/

Abstract

Sound and Research-Creation (SnRC) is introduced as a situated conceptual and pedagogical framework developed through my teaching practice in higher education. SnRC employs sound not as an object of study, but as a mode of inquiry and methodological mediator within artistic research, examining how sonic narration – often in the form of audio essays – can function as a research-creation method enabling reflection, self-reflexivity, and epistemic re-articulation. Central to this framework is a trans-positional approach. Students initially engage in experimental or reflective writing in relation to their emergent research concerns. This writing then forms the basis for scripting and producing sonically produced narrations. Through voicing, sequencing, and listening back, research is displaced from the textual register into an aural one. This displacement does not supplant the impetus of writing-through-practice; rather, sound acts upon it, re-conditioning how questions, concepts, and positions may otherwise be apprehended. The presentation situates this pedagogical framework within broader discussions of aural and sonic research practices by addressing sound as an epistemic operation rather than a representational medium. It responds to the symposium’s interest in mediation, translation, and sense-making by articulating how sonic methods are enacted through compositional and narrative practices within a specific artistic research pedagogy. In relation to the symposium’s concern with sonic democracy, the contribution reflects on narration and voice as situated practices shaping how agency and responsibility are articulated within research processes. Attending to how research is voiced, listened to, and mediated through sound, the framework foregrounds questions of who speaks, how research becomes shareable, and how meaning is negotiated through aural practices. Rather than proposing a generalisable method, the presentation offers an authored account of sound as a mediating practice within my approach to artistic research.

Petra Klusmeyer

Senior Artistic Research Associate in Sound Studies University of the Arts Bremen, Germany | PROFILE: Petra Klusmeyer is an artist, researcher, and educator whose work explores sound as an epistemic practice within artistic research. She works with sound as both aesthetic material and a means of inquiry and knowledge-making, investigating how sonic forms enable the expression of ideas and affects beyond visual or textual modes. Her work integrates research and teaching through Sound and Research-Creation (SnRC), a pedagogical framework for sound-led inquiry in higher education. www.petraklusmeyer.com/

Abstract

In this paper, we draw on our concept of mobile sonic citizenship: a form of citizenship that is performatively enacted through situated, relational sonic practice and that opens up “mobility” as a flow of identification, agentic expression, and relation-building through sound (Nenko, Aavanranta, Montes de Oca, Schlienger, forthcoming). In this spirit, we pursue the following questions: Can mobile sonic civic practices in urban space create an urban democracy, and what kind of democracy would it be? We consider urban democracy to be a conceptual and material space in which agonism (Mouffe 1999, 2005) and dissensus (Swyngedouw 2009) have a place, rather than being overruled by the compromise and consensus of the contemporary post-political condition (S. Žižek, E. Swyngedouw, Ch. Mouffe). This implies that a real plurality of ways of thinking and expressing oneself in urban space – potentially conflicting and counteracting – can unfold in the production of space, which thus remains, first and foremost, political. It also entails a return of “politics” over “police” (Rancière 2001), moving beyond the technocratic and bureaucratic orchestration of urban life, through the inclusion of a sensorial – specifically sonic – mode that enriches the repertoire of spatial practices. Seen through this prism, mobile sonic civic practices could enable the emergence of urban democracy in several ways. First, through the non-hierarchical organisation of temporary sonic communities that emerge within collective sonic sessions – mobile, yet anchored in the materiality of urban space. Second, through unregulated ways of engaging with sound, with no predefined sonic outcome or standard of quality, thereby opening possibilities for participants to express a wide range of affects and the depth of their sensorial selves. Third, through the creation of sonic spaces in the city as temporary utopian, heterotopic, and consonant or dissonant spaces. Fourth, through probing the boundaries of urban order governing shared and public spaces via soft sonic interventions and manifesting the existence of a “chaotic” sonic Other.

Oleksandra Nenko

Oleksandra Nenko, Doctor of Sociology, is a collegium researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Turku, and Docent in Placemaking and Urban Sustainability. In addition, Oleksandra is a visiting researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki and participates in the ExoSound project (2024–2028), funded by the Research Council of Finland. She serves on the boards of two research networks of the European Sociological Association: Sociology of the Arts and Urban Sociology. Oleksandra writes about urban culture, creative place-making, subjective perception of urban space, participatory and emotional mapping, and wartime art. She teaches at UTU and has been a visiting professor and lecturer at Uniarts Helsinki, Stockholm University, Tallinn University, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and other universities.

Otso Aavanranta

Otso Aavanranta is a professor of artistic research at the Uniarts Helsinki. He holds a doctorate in music from Paris 8 University, with past research appointments at Concordia University, Canada, and Mons University, Belgium. Otso’s approach is rooted in research–creation: combining exploratory artistic creation and academic enquiry into a mutually feeding loop. While the tools and methods of his research stem from music and technology, the themes of enquiry open up to larger, cross-disciplinary questions. Otso has led research projects on instrument augmentation, active acoustics, sound materialities, as well as intersubjectivity in music, and is currently working on outdoor electronic music.

Alejandro Montes de Oca

Alejandro Montes de Oca is a sound artist, electroacoustic musician and artist researcher based in Helsinki. He holds a doctorate in music from the Sibelius Academy and works as researcher, and teacher of electroacoustic music and sound art at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Alejandro’s work deals with the imagination of different sonic worlds, material and immaterial, with critical thinking and through the creative use of technologies. His work has been awarded at the Ljudbänken-Audiorama call 2026 (Sweden), 10th Electroacoustic Composition Competition Musica Viva (Portugal), the Franz Liszt Stipendium 2011 (Germany), the EAH Water Soundscape Composition Contest (Finland) and the 10th Luc Ferrari Composition Competition (France). His work has been released on various labels, and presented in different festivals, concerts and exhibitions in Europe and America.

Dominik Schlienger

Dominik Schlienger is a researcher, musician, and maker. His research topics include sustainable music technology for performance practices, and participatory design methods in technology development for the sonic arts. His interest centers on the role of technologies in social relations. The ethical question of appropriation and responsibility in the usage of technical tools motivates his research into agency and technology, expressed in a series of articles on the ethics in the discourse on "artificial intelligence". In parallel, he is founding member and coordinator of the Finnish registered association called GaiaStage Ry, An artistic research practice to develop alternative models for infrastructure projects in the music industry to explore carbon-neutral techniques for live-music stages.