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

22nd August 2023 / Online

Matilde Meireles will release a new album, Vanishing Points, with the experimental music label Crónica Electrónica on August 22nd.

The album is part of her larger artistic research on interconnectivity and extended critical listening methodologies for listening with, through and for, which includes various live performance iterations of the album Sunnyside released by Crónica in 2020; Multiple Perceptions of the Everyday Unfolded: The Case Study of Sunnyside, a journal article published on the Journal of Sonic Studies in January 2022; Echoes, a wandering concert for the European night of museums at Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris, a collaboration between SONCITIES and Eric de Visscher; critical listening workshops led by the SONCITIES research team; and Vanishing Points album, which combines traces of her movements in various urban spaces and their dialogue with the electromagnetic pulses around.

http://www.cronicaelectronica.org

3rd of August 2023 / 8-10pm / Accidental Theatre, Belfast

Matilde Meireles will perform at Handmade Music, a monthly night at Accidental Theatre in Belfast that is dedicated to experimental music. The nights are curated by Moving on Music (MOM) and the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC).

For this concert, Matilde will experiment with live performance ideas for her upcoming album launch at the Lisboa Soa Festival in Lisbon Portugal. Vanishing Points, will be released by Crónica Electrónica on the 22nd of August.

http://handmademusicbelfast.com

SONCITIES is thrilled to partner with Modern Art Oxford x EMPRES to present dry run no.1 (2023) by Anouk Albrecht (composition and interface and interaction design) and Elise Ludinard (choreography and movement).

The collaboration between Elise Ludinard, a dancer from Brussels, and Anouk Albrecht, a sound artist based in Nuremberg, experiments with the interplay of speed and a triggering of sound, additively exploring the space around the moving body. Radio microphones attached to the dancer continuously transmit audio signals to a mixing console, where they are mixed live. The performers navigate the sonic environments of the various body parts, which periodically become entangled in feedback and begin to structure the space. Sound becomes a kind of location determination in a constant negotiating between technology and physicality.

Tickets will be made available soon here, via Modern Art Oxford.

Biography for Anouk Albrecht

Anouk Albrecht (*2001) is a German sound and performance artist, born and raised in Freiburg near the French border.  

Her research-based work focuses on the temporal structuring of space through the use of sound performance, installation, video, and text. Anouk operates at the intersection of analog and digital media, with her works constantly oscillating between movement and stasis. She employs self-constructed technological apparatuses adapted to the body to explore and rearrange the relationships between performer and audience. In doing so, she intertwines technological modes of functioning with social processes.

After graduating from high school in 2019, Anouk relocated to Paris to work in the studio of Patrick Loughran, a US American ceramic artist. Since 2020, she has been part of the sound collective "Dynamic Acoustic Research", with whom she has performed at institutions such as Lenbachhaus Munich, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, and the House of World Cultures in Berlin. Her solo work has been shown, among others, at the Kunstverein Nuremberg and the Raumschiff in Linz, Austria. In 2022, she collaborated on field recordings on the greek island of Lesvos, and participated in a residency program at the Floating University in Berlin. Recently, Anouk was awarded a scholarship for the summer academy in Salzburg in 2023. Currently studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg in the class of Michael Stevenson, Anouk Albrecht lives and works in Nuremberg, Germany.

Biography for Elise Ludinard After graduating from SEAD (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance) in 2018, Elise started touring internationally, joining the company bodhi project (AU) for one year. She then worked with Maria Campos & Guy Nader, Francesco Scavetta, Lisi Estaras and José Agudo. 

She now works as a performer for different companies: HIMHERANDIT (DK), Milla Koistinen (GER), Cie Marinette Dozeville (FR), Eva Borrmann (GER). She created her own work, the solo "TANKROOM" in 2020, and the group piece "Theraland" (dance-architecture) in 2021. 

She co-created and curated the Brussels-based dance festival "TOP FLOOR Festival", a self organised and donation based event. In Brussels, she became co-founder of the HOEK collective (2019), an improvisation based dance research.

Warm thanks to Dan Hulme and Professor Jennifer Walshe in the Faculty of Music / EMPRES, Dr Diana Rodriguez-Perez at SONCITIES; and Sara Lowe and the staff at Modern Art Oxford for their support of this event.

Gascia Ouzounian will present a seminar on ‘Sonic Memories of the Armenian Genocide’ as part of the series The Silence and Visuality Seminars on Armenian Art & History - an interdisciplinary series presenting current research by emerging and established scholars, and conversations with distinguished contemporary artists. 

This series of talks is hosted by the Oxford Network for Armenian Genocide Research and supported by TORCH funding. Thank you to series conveners Dr Suzan Meryem Kalayci and Dr Vazken Khatchig Davidian for this generous invitation.

Please see here for more information about the talk.

Dr Ruth Bernatek presents her current SONCITIES research, ‘Anatomy of a Noise Complaint’, as part if the Urban Sound Symposium 2023. This paper examines acoustic cultures within a UK policy and legal framework, in particular, how noise complaint processes highlight complex built and systemic architectures of sound in the city and reveals marked ‘cracks’ in top-down urban management systems.

The three day symposium is centred around themes of urban sound planning and design, urban sound propagation and control, sound technologies, urban soundscape analysis and sound art.

Details of the full progam and how to register can be found here:

https://urban-sound-symposium.org/