Sonic Acts is an interdisciplinary arts organisation based in Amsterdam. 

Founded in 1994 to present new developments in electronic and digital art forms, Sonic Acts has gained prominence with its biennial international festival — an intensive art, theory and technology gathering motivated by changes in the ecological, political, technological and social landscape. Sonic Acts is also a leading platform for international projects, research and the commissioning and co-production of new artworks, often working together with local and international partner organisations such as independent and institutional cultural incubators, universities and kindred festivals.

In the course of its 30-year history, Sonic Acts has been a site for experimentation: a place to exchange, think, create, learn, and act. By presenting artistic investigations and research, Sonic Acts aims to advance experimentation and in turn provide a podium for dynamic perspectives that can be tools for discovery, growth, development, and emancipation – vital to understanding the complexities of our contemporary world.
 
With a focus on talent development, Sonic Acts supports a community of emerging artists through the residency and mentorship programmes [Overexposed](https://sonicacts.com/discover/overexposed) and [Underexposed](https://sonicacts.com/discover/underexposed), as well as through the commissioning and production of new artworks. The festival and year-round activities bring together artists, curators, critical thinkers and a curious, diverse audience. Next to its biennial festival, Sonic Acts organises [Workshops](https://sonicacts.com/archive/filter/Workshops), reading and listening groups focused on applied knowledge and addressing ecological concerns; and [Night Air](https://sonicacts.com/discover/night-air), a programme about pollution combining in-depth talks with films, live performances, and a club night. Sonic Acts publishes the magazine _[Ecoes](https://sonicacts.com/archive/ecoes )_ about art in the age of pollution, as well as books, music releases, and online publications in connection to its festival, commissioned works, and research projects.
 
Through this wide range of cross-disciplinary programmes, Sonic Acts explores the rapidly changing relationship between art, science, technology, and politics. The exhibitions, club nights, screenings, workshops, and symposia are grounds for radical audiovisual performances and installations, contemporary visual art, avant-garde film, progressive club music, and innovative new media, celebrating and fuelled by compelling artistic and critical perspectives.
 
Sonic Acts partners with a number of institutions across projects. As an ongoing member of both de [Zaak Nu](https://www.dezaaknu.nl/over-ons) and [MOKER](https://moker.amsterdam/), they join local forces to support the presentation and development of visual arts in Amsterdam and the Netherlands. Other completed collaborative projects have included the four-year art, research and commissioning project [Re-Imagine Europe](https://re-imagine-europe.eu/), initiated by Sonic Acts and organised in collaboration with ten cultural organisations across Europe; the [Progress Bar](https://sonicacts.com/discover/progress-bar) series, highlighting the latest tendencies in radical sound and club culture alongside urgent conversations about politics and society at large; the [Sonic Acts Academy](https://2020.sonicacts.com/about), a biannual forum dedicated to artistic research; and [Murmansk Prospekt](https://murmanskprospekt.net/), a collaboration exploring the impact of human beings on the planet. Earlier projects include the international research and commissioning project [Dark Ecology](https://sonicacts-frontend.vercel.app/discover/dark-ecology), as well as the programming of three editions of the [Kontraste Festival](https://sonicacts-frontend.vercel.app/discover/kontraste) in Krems, Austria.

History

The Sonic Acts Archive collects documentation about works, events, and people, including audio-visual material, essays, interviews and publications that have been presented across Sonic Acts’ multi-faced programming.

Having evolved from a niche event for enthusiasts, blending academic music with cutting-edge electronic sounds, into a thematic festival and commissioning body that foregrounds the cross-pollination of art, music, science and technology, the institutional archive generated as a result focuses on the production of new media art. It documents the processes of creating new media works and practitioners’ engagement with “new technologies”, the networks of people (artists, curators, producers, and technicians that attend to it) and the material histories of tools and procedures used by artists (across visual, sound and film media) to present and create such works. Finally, it illuminates the crucial role of the festival as a site of creation of artistic work, equivalent in importance to the artist's studio, the darkroom or the writer’s desk – a goal that echoes the intentions behind the very founding of Sonic Acts Festival back in 1994.

The Sonic Acts Archive advocates for social memory, for sensorial experiences and ‘hard to discipline’ artworks and performances that require specific presentational formats and participatory audiences of a festival setting to exist.

The physical archive is currently accessible by appointment. Access to material or assistance with research projects can be arranged by contacting us at [archive@sonicacts.com](mailto:archive@sonicacts.com).

Colophon

**Funders 2023–2024**\
[Creative Industries Fund NL](https://www.stimuleringsfonds.nl/en)\
[Amsterdam Fund for the Arts](https://www.amsterdamsfondsvoordekunst.nl/en/)\
[Cultuurloket DigitALL](https://cultuurloketdigitall.nl/)\
[Mondriaan Fund](https://www.mondriaanfonds.nl/en/homepage-2/)\
[Provincie Noord-Holland](https://www.noord-holland.nl/)\
[Netherlands Film Fund](https://www.filmfonds.nl/)\
[Fonds 21](https://www.fonds21.nl/)\
[Hartwig Art Foundation](https://www.hartwigartfoundation.nl/)\
[Het Cultuurfonds](https://www.cultuurfonds.nl/)\
[Cultural Participation Fund](https://cultuurparticipatie.nl/)\
[Performing Arts Fund NL](https://fondspodiumkunsten.nl/)\
[Stichting Zabawas](https://www.zabawas.nl/)\
[Gravin van Bylandt Stichting](https://www.bylandtstichting.nl/)\
[Re-Imagine Europe](https://re-imagine-europe.eu/), co-funded by the European Union\
[Erasmus+](https://erasmus-plus.ec.europa.eu/)

**Partners, Collaborators & Friends**\
A4, Academy of Motion Pictures Museum, All Rent, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Antenne Books, ArtScience Interfaculty, ArtEZ, Atheneum, BeamSystems, BEK – Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts, Berlin Art Book Fair and Festival, Bimhuis, Borealis Festival, Canal++, De Appel, de Bijloke, De Zaak Nu, Disruption Network Lab, Elevate Festival, Environmental Humanities UvA, Eye Filmmuseum, Field Station Friesland, FieldARTS, Forte Marghera, Garage Noord, Galerie Khoshbakht, Goethe-Institut Niederlande, Hackers & Designers, Het Hem, Het Lage Noorden, Hogeschool voor Kunsten Utrecht, Idea Books, INA GRM, Institut Français NL, Jacuzzi, JaJaJaNeeNeeNee, kanaal40, Kentalis, Kontejner, Kontrapunkt, La Biennale di Venezia, Ledlease, Looiersgracht 60, Michel Waisvisz Archief, MOKER PO_i, Muziekgebouw, NADD, Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis, Nieuwe Instituut, OT301, Oude Kerk, Paradiso, PAV – Parco Arte Vivente, Partyzaan, Radio Web MACBA, Radio Worm, Rijksakademie, Ruigoord, Rupert, SALWA, San Seriffe, Semibreve, Showcare, Singelkerk, SoundLAB, Spatial Media Laboratories, Stack Magazines, Stichting de Vrolijkheid Almere, Stichting Huygens-Fokker, Stichting IMC Weekendschool, Studio405, STUK, Subbacultcha, Teatro alle Tese, Tempel, Underbelly, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Universiteit Utrecht, University of Hong Kong, W139, We Are Public, WG Theatertechniek, Willem Twee Studios, Zone2Source


Funders

Stichting Sonic Acts is door de Belastingdienst aangewezen als culturele Algemeen Nut Beogende Instelling (ANBI). Deze status geeft donateurs de mogelijkheid een financiële gift fiscaal van de belasting af te trekken.

**Bank- en factuurgegevens**\
KvK: 34198520\
BTW NR: NL814129201B01\
RSIN: 814129201\
IBAN: NL31RABO0115136169\
BIC: RABONL2U\
Adres:

Stichting Sonic Acts\
Weteringschans 6-8\
1017SG\
Amsterdam

**Directeur**\
Lucas van der Velden

**Raad van Toezicht**\
Mariette Dölle\
Nduka Mntambo\
Joost Rekveld (Voorzitter)


Sonic Acts hanteert de salarisrichtlijn van De Zaak Nu. De raad van toezicht verricht haar werkzaamheden onbezoldigd.

**Doelstelling**\
De stichting heeft ten doel het bevorderen van activiteiten en onderzoek op het gebied van de electronische muziek, de nieuwe media, kunst en cultuur en voorts alles wat daarmee inde in de meest brede zin des woords verband houdt of daartoe bevorderlijk kan zijn.

[Annual Report 2021](https://portal.sonicacts.com/uploads/Sonic_Acts_Annual_Report_2021_38ba1ba1d3.pdf?updated_at=2022-10-12T08:18:44.351Z)\
[Annual Report 2022](https://portal.sonicacts.com/uploads/Sonic_Acts_Annual_Report2022_LR_81c55f78bd.pdf?updated_at=2023-09-14T14:58:52.187Z)

[Jaarrekening 2021](https://portal.sonicacts.com/uploads/Sonic_Acts_Jaarrekening_2021_c5c97ce666.pdf?updated_at=2023-04-11T11:23:29.806Z)\
[Jaarekening 2022](https://cms.sonicacts.com/uploads/Sonic_Acts_Jaarrekening_2022_79954f3f5c.pdf)

[Download het Standaardformulier publicatieplicht ANBI algemeen](https://cms.sonicacts.com/uploads/standaardform_pubplicht_anbi_algemeen_sa_2022_598782db3a.pdf?updated_at=2023-09-25T12:27:11.309Z). 

[Hoofdlijnen beleidsplan](https://portal.sonicacts.com/uploads/25501789_f26cec10d2.pdf?updated_at=2023-04-11T11:25:54.092Z).


ANBI

We currently have two vacacnies in the Communications team. Find out more on [Homerun](https://sonicacts.homerun.co/communications-manager-3/en).

[Subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates](https://sonicacts.us6.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=f8f2c0dae61384c2dba08e8ec&id=87c02476f0)

Vacancies

Sonic Acts aims to provide a safe and open forum for everyone. We are committed to creating a positive experience for our audience and artists free of intimidation, harassment, discrimination, aggression, sexism, and threatening or disrespectful language or behaviour regardless of gender identity, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, race, ethnicity, or religion. 

We follow and uphold this Code of Conduct in everything we do and it applies to everyone involved – both working or visiting Sonic Acts events. We also communicate it to all participating artists, our employees, partners, and freelancers who work with us. 

Sonic Acts reserves the right to revoke access to events for those who engage in inappropriate behaviour. If someone reports a breach of this Code during our events or in our online spaces, we will work with the complainant to determine an appropriate response. Please notify our staff members or email us at [info@sonicacts.com](mailto:info@sonicacts.com).

Remember to…\
… encourage a safe environment free from harassment and discrimination\
… be actively inclusive and challenge all discriminatory behaviours\
… respect boundaries and be mindful that each person has different boundaries\
… be aware of and challenge your own prejudices and privileges\
… respect how people choose to identify\
… listen if someone challenges you about your own behaviour\
… take care of your health and safety\
… respect the privacy of others

Code of Conduct

These house rules apply to both Sonic Acts organisation and employees and the visitors of its events. When buying a ticket to our events you agree to the following conditions and instructions given by the (event) staff. For all cases and/or situations not provided for in the house rules, the organisation reserves the right to impose additional rules verbally and/or in writing to which the visitor is bound.
 
The regulations have been drawn up to ensure order and safety during events:
 
- If ticket irregularities are discovered, such as false and/or duplicate tickets, or an attempt to gain access without a valid ticket, access will be denied, and a report will be made to the police.
- Tickets purchased online are strictly personal and non-transferable. You may be asked to identify yourself with a valid ID.
- Entering the event site is entirely at the visitor's own risk. The organisation is not liable for any injuries or damage caused to visitors and/or visitors' goods. This also includes theft and loss.
- Bringing professional sound recording and video equipment is not permitted, unless accreditation has been agreed in writing with the organisation.
- It is not permitted to distribute flyers, undertake promotional activities or trade goods on or near the event site without consultation with the organisation.
- The judgment of the security staff is binding. If prohibited items are found, you will be handed over to the police. Confiscated items will not be returned.
- During Sonic Acts events photo and sound recordings are made. Upon arrival, visitors tacitly give the organisation permission to reproduce, make public and/or use these recordings for promotional purposes. Would you rather not have us use a photo of you? Please contact us at [info@sonicacts.com](mailto:info@sonicacts.com) and we will remove the photo(s) in question.
- The house rules of the location have priority over these rules. If there are no house rules, rules drafted here will apply.
- In the event of disruptive behaviour, Sonic Acts and/or the venue reserves the right to remove individuals, as well as deny further access to the site and/or to the Sonic Acts events for a specified or indefinite period of time on the basis of Article 138 of the Criminal Code and Sonic Acts Code of Conduct.

House Rules

If you have any questions for Sonic Acts, including press enquiries, booking proposals or shop-related queries, please contact us at the relevant email address:

info@sonicacts.com\
residency@sonicacts.com\
press@sonicacts.com\
shop@sonicacts.com\
bookings@sonicacts.com

Sonic Acts\
Weteringschans 6–8\
1017 SG Amsterdam\
The Netherlands

Contact

An interdisciplinary arts organisation based in Amsterdam.

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Sonic Acts

An interdisciplinary arts organisation based in Amsterdam. 

The following interview comes from the Sonic Acts Press publication _The Poetics of Space_ (2010). Read this and much more by ordering a digital copy of the publication [from our webshop](https://shop.sonicacts.com/product/the-poetics-of-space-pdf/)

As someone whose entry point into the vast world of musical repertoire has mostly been by collecting records and since the most unusual and unique things are usually the hardest ones to hear live, Maryanne Amacher has always been something of an enigma to me. A composer of vast, space-specific sonic panoramas at crushingly loud volumes, Amacher defies containment and commodification. When Tzadik finally released a CD of her music, I finally thought I was able to experience it. But actually, I hadn’t. Two speakers can’t really convey what she is doing in space and as an apartment dweller the kinds of volumes she demands would inevitably lead to an eviction. Yet through listening and reading her essays on various subjects, especially her fascinating contribution to a panel on Cage’s influence where she spoke about creating a music that is somehow liberated from time, I felt compelled to talk to her. We spent only about an hour in conversation – the unfortunate time constraints of a reality based on schedules – but it felt like it could have gone on forever. And, in some ways, it will...

**Frank J. Oteri**: The work you do inhabits its own unique realm that is sometimes quite
at odds with most of the presentational aspects we take for granted with most music:
it’s really not meant to be listened to the same way in time, in space or in volume...
So, how you feel about describing your work as music? How does it fit in with the history
of music of the past and how it points to the music of the future?

**Maryanne Amacher**: Well that’s a difficult question [_laughs_]. Are you thinking of concert music?

**FJO**: I’m thinking of the role that music has had in society, the relationship people have to is as listeners, the context of concerts, recordings, how it’s assimilated, how it’s taught, how it’s learned, how it’s acculturated in different societies... What you’re doing seems to be somehow beyond that. Obviously it uses sound, tone, and timbre, but it’s doing something else.

**MA**: I think I know how I can discuss that with you, but first I’m wondering if you’re thinking more of concerts because occasionally people react and say, ‘Oh, this is a _real_ experience...’ because of the staging and presentation. I guess it’s also because of the music, but I’m interested in making a very different situation for people. From the very beginning, I wanted to do experiential work. I was working
with electronic means, therefore I could sit and observe various things. I could try to understand more about what was happening to my ears, to my body, all over. I think I do music because I’m trying to understand. The ear-tones that I played for you are referred to as otoacoustic emissions. I heard those very early on when I was beginning to work, so I wanted to create a kind of music where the listener actually has vivid experiences of contributing this other sonic dimension to the music that their ears are making. I’ve become very involved with situations like that. My approach is more like in science, although music is emotional and everything else. I sit and listen and I hear things, then I discover how I can expand them or increase them and try to understand them. I think of them as perceptual geographies actually. Ways of hearing – how we hear things far away; how we hear things close by. How suddenly in your head there almost is sound, continuing and continuing. It’s particularly effective after very strong sections with enormously long fades, but it has to be done in such a way that the sonic shapes are lingering in your mind afterwards. I believe a lot of music, particularly as it developed from the past, was really a rearrangement of the figures of other men’s music – I’m not talking about sampling – but it’s just snatching little things and doing your own personalized sequence in time. Whereas, I think my tendency was to become much more involved in the so-called physics – I don’t like the word psychoacoustics – both of music and how our perceptual experience changes when sounds are just travelling around here and it sounds like it’s miles away, when it seems like it’s only in your head...

**FJO**: You studied with Stockhausen and he was certainly a forerunner of the work you do. He was one of the pioneers of having multiple speakers and later, he did a work that was an entire house, every room had different music happening on it.

**MA**: I think I was fortunate in that the first electronic music I heard was in Cologne on multiple speakers. Being a fan of Varèse, I immediately connected to imagining the spacialization of sound, and then to have had the wonderful opportunity to study a little bit with Stockhausen, it was just incredible.

**FJO**: But at the same time, there’s something so human about the music that you’re creating and how people’s ears are responding. It’s so fundamentally human in some ways even though it’s all created with machines, with electronics. There’s something wonderfully contradictory and beautiful about that. This is somehow a music that could only be created in our lifetime. Maybe you could get strings or the human voice to do this...

**MA**: Of course.

**FJO**: But that’s not what you do. Is that something you’d be interested in doing?

**MA**: Well, of course I could but the advantage for me is I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me that they’re machines or computers but I think what was of value was the possibility of being able to work this way, that you do sound explorentally – you could sit and listen and observe things, observe shapes. There is a situation when you have architecture as I’m describing it – physical architecture, these larger spaces. It is a very communal thing and because of the dimensions of the space itself connecting to the music in the way it does, it creates a very liberating experience. I mean, people dance. It’s very different than if you’re in a small place or particularly if you’re keeping your seat.

**FJO**: There’s something sort of imprisoning about sitting in a concert hall and having to be quiet.

**MA**: Well it’s not even that. I think it’s known that you actually experience sound better when you move, which also connects to dancing.

**FJO**: When you were playing your work for us you said make sure to move all around.

**MA**: Yeah, and it’s fun to move your head and to kind of dance.

### Aural Architecture

**FJO**: Some of the words you’ve used to describe your work are: architecture, choreography, and neurobiology. You’re really using sound architecturally. That’s sort of a different construction. Music historically and culturally seems to exist as a social behavior that occurs over time. What my ears are hearing seems more like a sonic architecture occurring in space rather than developing over time.

**MA**: I actually do think of it more as an aural architecture. I think of it quite literally in terms of architecture itself. When I’m able to have the opportunity to make a large installation, I learn the acoustics of the place, and I can work in more than one room: I may have six, I may have four, I may have seven rooms, or the entire structure. All of that began not because I had a fixed notion. Really it began because I hated loudspeakers. I was working in electronic media, so it was quite a contradictory thing. I was always interested in the spatial aspects of sound. I discovered that maybe if I put the speaker in there [_points to the kitchen_] – the way that you heard it from another room became much more rewarding. I could make a virtual meta-space, so you wouldn’t get the sense of these [_gestures to a nearby loudspeaker_] boxes.

**FJO**: In terms of the space that you’re creating for a listener, to some extent the listener creates
his or her own space because there’s no predetermined path. If you have sound coming
out of six rooms...

**MA**: No, it’s like a sonic choreography. I have to think of the scenario, otherwise everyone would just walk around and the experience would not be vivid. Usually on a large work, I work there for three weeks. It’s like creating a narrative. I realized that there were sonic characters and they could appear and interact with each other. It’s very interesting how people walk in a main space. How do they know something is part of the composition? Maybe you pass out something and half the people don’t read it. I might have something in a distant room that draws them to it. I’m always performing between these rooms. I still maintain that I like the intensity of this directness of performing, even though the installation is all the work that went in beforehand.

**FJO**: So what constitutes a performance? What is a performance?

**MA**: It’s just me mixing. Of course there are visual elements, and the performance with the people, that’s what I’m talking about. I’m mixing live and I’m connecting with an audience rather than just having this on a hard drive. 

**FJO**: And the mixing that you’re doing, you’re responding to the audience as they are there, so there is an element of improvisation to it, if you would? How much of it is predetermined?

**MA**: See that’s when you get into this funny area. [_laughs_] Music is crazy...
it’s insane. Of course I’m improvising. But I’m not improvising the notes.

**FJO**: Right. The notes are there, prerecorded.

**MA**: Yes, or else I might be making them with samplers or something, but I’m not having the notes come out of my head. What I’m doing is, again, dealing with these perceptual degrees, degrees of sensitivity, degrees of intensity, and things like that. Not the notes because you can play something a million different ways.

**FJO**: In a weird sort of way you’re almost doing what a conductor does with an orchestra. Bringing out the woodwinds in a certain passage, et cetera...

**MA**: Yes. I never thought of it that way, but it is like that because the basic music is in a way very raw. It’s nothing without the oomph. I mean I’ve come back from these works to where we’re sitting now and it takes me over a month to be able to even hear. I have learned what I’ve been able to learn because I have worked in these situations.

### Perception

**FJO**: You formulate ideas in your studio before they ever have a life as a work in the space they are intended for. What sort of process generates the decisions that you make here about the pitch content, let’s say? We talked about pitches and they’re all done beforehand. Are there systems at play that generate the pitch content?

**MA**: Well, I’m concerned with various tunings. That’s one thing.

**FJO**: Microtonal scales?

**MA**: Sure. And I’m very interested in what are called second order effects in psychoacoustics, which are not the ear phenomena when you tune very close – when you do it with unison it has to be binaural or else you just get beats – but when the beats disappear and you get closer and closer to the 3rd or the 5th or whatever interval and it turns into a shape. I’ve always been very preoccupied with these different shapes, and of course I have particular frequencies I like, too. But it’s the shapes, when it gets really slow and huge, and you’re not hearing the beats but it is a beat frequency that’s producing the shape. It’s something that I’ve experienced, again, only because I work experientially. I used to move from studio to studio always trying to tune these oscillators to get these things. [Sigh] They would drift and it was making me crazy. Once I got locked into the Queens studio all weekend and it was 98 degrees. After that I thought I was never going to do this kind of work again until I had my own setup. Shortly after that it was great to read this article in _Scientific American_ called ‘Auditory Beats in the Brain’ [October 1973]. The author, biophysicist Gerald Oster, did many experiments and people experienced these different shapes as spirals... They perceived them in the experiments he made. It was really helpful to me. I later met him in New York. 

**FJO**: Now, in terms of perception, most of the music around us these days – whether it’s commercial popular music or classical music, jazz, or even most experimental music – is created within a pitch grid of twelve-tone equal temperament and anything else is somehow alien. The ear can hear so much more than that, yet if you’re not acclimated to it, you might perceive anything else as indistinguishable or as being out of tune. Anyone should be able to hear a just interval like a pure 5th, a pure 3rd, or a natural 7th, an extraordinarily beautiful interval which hadn’t existed in most music until contemporary composers started using it again. How important for you is audience perception? Is it important to you that they hear what you’re hearing?

**MA**: I’m not sure we always hear the same things, but I think what I was just talking about with pattern modulation, when you get these shapes, I think everyone experiences that. I don’t know if it’s so much a matter of everyone experiencing what I’m experiencing. But I would like it, whatever it is, to be vivid and have a kind of reality to it. It’s not based on some kind of habit. These are vivid experiences. Yours might be different from mine... I don’t think I could do it with two speakers. I don’t even like to do it with multi-speakers, with 15 speakers all around because all this direct sound loses a kind of magic.

**FJO**: In a book about John Cage that you contributed an essay to, you brought up something that I thought was so interesting about how music is packaged. We have this notion that everybody has to have the same experience of a pop song or a Mozart recording. You have a big audience that comes to hear a performance and they all should be hearing the same thing, but in fact no one hears the exact same thing. Each person is different and does not hear things the same way. As you said, a work of art, a painting, or a sculpture, is a singularity, only one of it exists. You might reproduce it in a book, but it’s not the work. Whereas with music, we have a notion that it’s reproducible. There can be 1000 copies of a recording of Mozart’s _Jupiter Symphony_ or the latest Ricky Martin pop single, and they’re exactly the same. But the reality is much subtler than that. Each person has his or her own music and that is something that hasn’t really been addressed in the history of music.

**MA**: I have no doubt that will be one part of music in the future. Today with all the customization and tailoring, you no longer have to necessarily think about music for millions. Music can be for millions, but it can actually be tailored for a specific individual. Just yesterday a chemist at UCLA who used techniques from nanotechnology took yeast cells and made a nanodevice which he used to discover that the cells produce sounds. It’s not proven yet. These were just yeast cells, which were supposedly emitting a frequency that could be heard. The frequency was about a C-sharp or D one octave about middle C. They’re very hopeful that if it’s proven, it could be very beneficial for health purposes. This connection of music to certain cells is basically what I talked about in the article about Cage. The person creating the music may eventually be able to create certain movements in the cells themselves. _Living Sound, Patent Pending_, which I made in 1980, was one of the projections. Not too long ago there was a microbiologist in San Diego and he spilled this sample on a CD, a music CD. He didn’t realize it right away and he tried to put it in the player and of course it didn’t play. Because he was very clever he worked out this whole idea – which I can’t explain well right now – of the genetic detecting of the protein molecules, which is an expensive operation. These machines are like $300,000 in each lab. He was able to do that, maybe not quite as exact, but using this crazy technique and an ink jet printer that he got at a garage sale for $20. He wasn’t talking about it producing sounds, see that’s the catch. I just made my first work in this futurist projection, which is really just quite fun. I didn’t have anything else, so I put my blood on the CD, and of course I put some sound. I called it Interactive Precursor, _First Protein Modulation_; I can show it to you.

**FJO**: Yeah, at some point maybe.

**MA**: But then I thought more and more about it. Won’t it be fantastic because everyone says, ‘Oh, CDs. We’re just going to get everything from streaming live.’ So this will be a great use for a CD. Then, you know, you can mix different things like our bloods and so on and see how that interacts with the music [laughs].

**FJO**: When we first came over and you were playing us your work, we heard it in a whole different way. In terms of the physical nature of different people responding to sound in different ways and it being a personalized experience for everybody, you discovered something very early on that’s been a very key part of your vocabulary, and this is this music for the ‘third ear’. As I listened I actually felt something. I felt my ear vibrating. It was startling. I felt it listening to the disc before, but I never felt it as strongly as I did this afternoon. It was a very intense physical experience. I think the only other time I’d ever felt it was when music had been too loud and it was painful. It’s something we’re actually taught to avoid. But this wasn’t painful. This was something else. It was actually rather the opposite of painful. It felt like my ears were being tickled. It is a very, very interesting phenomenon. How did you first stumble upon these sounds? How do you use them? Why do they do that? How did you get my ears to do that?

**MA**: First of all it’s another one of those things that I observed very early. It was all part of this notion of perceptual geographies. In 1977, the theory was proven – even though this was postulated by Thomas Gold in 1948 – that the ear actually emits sound as well as receives it. So there are laboratories all over the world dedicated to this. Now see, this is what I think is funny about music – none of us know this. What in the world are we doing? I mean really to compose consciously. I’ve been trying half of my life to get this program where I can really know that if I choose a second combination of tones that this low D-sharp is going to have a certain kind of timbre that my ear is making, a certain quality, rather than if I choose another one. I really want to know this, because this same low D-sharp of 77Hz will sound from many different intervals. You know it’s a bit obscured by the timbres, right? But our ears are doing this all the time. So these things can be reinforced or they can be enhanced for a more vivid experience in the music you create.

**FJO**: You played us a QuickTime file of an organist playing the famous _Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor_, with video of what it was doing to someone’s ear. The more voices that were added to that famous chord in the beginning, the more things started appearing in the ear as a response. So if this has been a part of all the music we hear, why is it that until I heard your music this afternoon, I wasn’t aware of it?

**MA:** It’s just so strange about music. [_laughs_] I don’t know. I guess that’s what fascinates me about it because this is a very fundamental thing. And, not only that, in laboratories they test hearing this way and they test babies and you can actually listen to another person’s ear, even. These are called otoacoustic emissions or SOAEs. If you’re in a quiet enough place some people actually are able to hear the sound that’s coming out of another person and this is not stimulated by sound.

**FJO**: But this has never been part of the vocabulary. This is not part of the vocabulary of music
in any culture, or at least not the conscious vocabulary as far as I know...

**MA**: Not so true, I mean look at all the Tibetan and Mongolian people singing to make those results. I’m sure they know what they want to make and they have conscious effects. Maybe they don’t think about it the same way. It’s even speculated that in really vivid performances of, you know, concertos or what have you, people are bringing out some of these qualities. What’s exciting for me is because all this has sort of been subliminally experienced in our music, because of the complexity of the overtones and everything, it’s exciting to think of the kind of energy that could be released when it’s not suppressed anymore. Imagine an audience in a concert hall just creating this music that’s a part of the string quartet at the same time.

**FJO**: So there are certain combinations of frequencies and timbres that will do this?

**MA**: Well, what I just played for you, for example, is something that I just make intuitively. I don’t know actually what’s going on because you could listen to that, not that you’d want to, but you could listen to it for 24 hours or something and you’d still get the effect. The other kind of choice is what are called first, second, and third order difference tones. Now, we’re getting these all the time in electronic music and sometimes it sounds like you know a funny modulation or funny garble and you think it’s timbre. It’s not – your ear is doing that. Your ear is making a lot of these funny sounds. It’s not necessarily the electronics at all. But you know it’s quite a challenge because you would habituate. You would get the experience and then suddenly, you would become desensitized to it. You would know it. Part of the craft is how you would remove this if you chose to do that.

### All-Time Music

**FJO**: I’d like to get back to your essay in the book about Cage after what you just said about listening to something for 24 hours. This is one of the things that really got me very excited about talking to you and there’s this quote that appears in that same essay that reinforced it. You wrote: ‘As the possibilities of all-sound music of the future were to Cage, the possibilities of all-time music are to me. In theory, years, weeks, days, minutes, seconds will be possible.’ So there no longer needs to be this notion of a piece of music, a string quartet that’s half an hour long, or a three-minute pop song, or a two or three- hour opera. Your music seems to exist beyond time; it’s not really about time, at least not in a metrical sense...

**MA**: Not that kind of time, it’s more like the time in life when something appears and disappears and maybe you don’t hear it again for a half hour, you may not hear it for an hour. Suddenly a boat appears after five hours and it gets closer and closer, you know, and makes an approach. It’s time like that because we have the means now to do that.

**FJO**: But when you create a work you don’t think about whether something is going to
last twenty minutes or two hours? Or do you?

**MA:** Well, as a composer I am fascinated by this. I see what I wrote about in that article as really an expansion of even classical music, of phrase structure. We used to call it the elemental line. It’s like you’re trapped, one thing has to come after another. It was always my obsession to get out of the elemental line. I studied medieval metaphysics and I used to try to think of ways of making a macrostructure. Particularly, if you’re trained as a musician you do this or that because this is the right note to play and it’s all based on habit. I did a psycho-analysis of all my musical habits in order to try to stretch them. How you decide what comes after which is another arbitrary thing. It’s more effective with these after-sounds if you let the sound go completely out of the head, which could last eight minutes or longer. You know I once did that in a work with Merce Cunningham. It was such a glorious kind of experience...

**FJO**: Last season, as part of the all-David Lang concert at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, Alarm Will Sound performed _The Passing Measures_ which lasts for about an hour or so. At the end of the piece, the conductor stopped and didn’t signal it was over, and there was this silence for maybe two minutes.

**MA**: ...Oh, that’s beautiful...

**FJO**: After about two minutes somebody finally broke it by starting to clap. But for those two minutes, time stood still. That silence at the end I thought was the most stunning music I had ever heard live in a concert hall. And it was incredible because it wasn’t silence, it was a lingering uncertainty... I love David’s piece but for me the silence was even better than the piece.

**MA**: Because you had time, and it is true. There is a part of timing when one thing ends and another thing begins that actually is another thing that as composers we should be probably more conscious of manipulating and controlling.

### The Problem with Recordings

**FJO**: You played us some excerpts and they were these cyclical things that happened and we
didn’t hear it in its entirety. Is it important to hear the entire thing?

**MA**: Well I don’t know if it is on the CD. It certainly is in the actual hall. Some
people relate to CDs better than me. I have a little problem with them.

**FJO**: Let’s talk then about live performances where people will go and hear this work that exists
in four rooms. Does this work then have a beginning, middle, and end? Do people show
up at a certain time?

**MA**: No, they show up at the beginning. For a while I did another series called the _Mini-Sound Series_. It got more and more interesting the more I did it in different places because the idea was like television where the story continues the next week, and it was a fascinating involvement with the audience. It was not continuous music. We can make sounds go on for as long as we want. I’m more interested in making appearances and things like that. The end you spoke of with David’s piece, I’ve experienced that a number of times, I mean with my own work.

**FJO**: So there is an ending, there’s an actual ending?

**MA**: Oh, yes. My first work was doing more or less pure installation work with these _City Links_ pieces in which I brought in remote sounds. I had microphones in different remote environments and brought up those sounds in the gallery or museum or wherever. It also involved performance. The sound was alive and it came through high quality telephone lines – people always thought I was playing a cassette. It was just hard for them to realize at that time that this was actually live sound. It was also very interesting to have more than one location and the kind of simultaneous synchronic things that would happen. You know, there are no laws. 

**FJO**: Well, let’s talk about connecting to the music world. There is this CD out on Tzadik which is fantastic and it’s gotten rave reviews all over the place, yet somehow it doesn’t represent your work. To use a visual analogy, it’s only a photograph of it. We’re living in a society where recordings are the way people’s work gets transmitted. I’ve been to a lot of concerts, yet most of the music I have heard I have not heard live. I’ve heard it because of an LP or a CD or a radio broadcast or from the Web. It’s a blessing and a curse. It means that we can hear more music now than we’ve ever been able to hear anywhere. We have a wider vocabulary, but it’s also limiting because we only get these ‘photographs’ of music...

**MA**: Well, I think a lot of music is much more thrilling live. But it doesn’t bother other people making music. It’s just my thing because as I say I can’t even listen to my own studio when I come back from having wonderful architecture where I’m able to make my music. If I were doing just purely beat music, or even those ear effects, that’s only a question of playing them. But my music is so dense and has so many parts that to me it sounds like all these spirits are trapped in these boxes [_gestures to a speaker_] trying to get out and it sounds very harsh. Right now I’m very excited because I’ve never heard any of my music at the higher sampling rates and I think that will make a difference. It’s never going to be the same as architecture but at least maybe these parts won’t be so trapped and you’ll be hearing some of the dimension. We were talking earlier about what I’m doing when I’m actually creating and of course I talked about the perceptual things, but it’s a mystery because when I go somewhere, like the Maastunnel in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, I had this music that I didn’t understand half of until I worked with it in the place. But why did I make it here? It’s a mystery, so what am I doing? It’s so dense because it has a lot of parts. Maybe my brain just can’t deal with it and I’m imagining the sound that I get when it’s in one of these architectures. I think that’s also what people do that enjoy some of this dense music on CD because they’re imagining, which in itself is very interesting because I would like to dream that I could make music that triggered another music in the listener’s mind. I think to me it’s almost more interesting than the music itself really.

**FJO**: A few years ago everybody though the hot thing was going to be 5.1 surround sound. Starkland asked a bunch of composers to write new pieces for 5.1 surround sound and they put them out on a CD. Pamela Z did a piece; Meredith Monk did a piece... But, in a way, if two speakers trap ghosts of your sounds in a box, 5.1 gives you three more speakers...

**MA**: But still you get the dregs. A lot of people say you need over 20 or something like that. I don’t think I would like that. I wish you could just spray it. Just get into the ions, excite the ions.

Extremities

The following text comes from the sixth issue of _Ecoes_, Sonic Acts' periodic magazine about art in the age of pollution. Read this and much more in print by ordering a copy from our [webshop](https://shop.sonicacts.com/).

The anniversary of Sonic Acts marks a reflective moment – a time to look back upon 30 years of remarkable adventures with spatial sound and image. Since the very first iteration of the festival in the early 1990s, Sonic Acts has presented spatial sound in various forms, reappropriating sonic architectures and investigating multichannel configurations as a diverse musical medium. Invited artists redefined musical space, rethinking how we can compose and listen.

A relatively recent online initiative, the Spatial Sound Platform is embedded in and seeks to reflect this history by engaging with online audiences. During the 2024 edition of the Biennial, Zone2Source will serve as a physical location for the platform. At the arts space, located in Amstelpark, iconic works from the archive will be showcased as part of the Listening Room, alongside newly commissioned pieces, workshops, and multichannel live performances. A selection of works will also be (re)designed for headphones and sound systems with spatial sound capabilities.

The 30th anniversary has inspired a deep dive into the archive, as part of a wider project to restructure and reorganise its content. Since its inception, the organisation has been archiving performances, artworks, and lectures. In the Sonic Acts archive, over 250 artistic works deal specifically with the effects of sound in a space. Encompassing field recordists and live performers, composers and media artists, vastly diverse approaches and concepts are represented, bringing together practitioners from a wide variety of backgrounds and interests.

Each multichannel live performance is a unique experience, unfolding in a specific moment and context, and engaging with the particular acoustic characteristics of a place, the atmosphere, and the listener(s). Largely unedited, the recordings of these performances in the archive are imbued with unfiltered, intricate resonances. While listening to the recordings, I encountered the sensibility of each performance and the way the textures, rhythms, and movements of the sounds are formed, contained, and translated over time. How do these raw materials reverberate? What do we hear? And how can we listen from plural perspectives? The privileging of sight over all the other senses in our society means that we are familiar with reading and interpreting meaning from an image, but how are context and artistic vision transmitted through sound? And how can we critically reflect upon the way we listen? Listening anew to the unearthed recordings is almost like an acousmatic experience, where the source of the sound is hidden from view. Little of the historical background is revealed, but instead the intimate immediacy is echoed or reproduced.

Together with interviews, images, videos, and texts, the recordings in the archive form a multitude of possible historical narratives. From these materials, what tendencies and orientations can be distinguished? This essay gives a wide overview of some of the artistic works and projects that were realised in the past 30 years, and how they resonate with the ideas of the artists and cultural contexts they were or continued to be immersed in.

# Sounding architectures
Sonic Acts has a tradition of resisting and redefining listening norms set by the entertainment industry. Unfolding in Amsterdam venues with multiple acoustic identities, such as old churches (Paradiso), museums (Stedelijk Museum) or industrial buildings (Het HEM), Sonic Acts has presented a multitude of multichannel setups that vary from ‘traditional’ quadraphonic, octophonic, or hexaphonic configurations, to advanced surround systems. These sonic architectures represent various approaches to projecting, diffusing, and perceiving sound in space. Each time they form a different creative context for makers.

In 2003, a light and projection installation, the _Sonic Light Box_, split the main hall of Paradiso into two, with a twelve-channel speaker
setup installed both on the ground level and balconies. Almost like a _gesamtkunstwerk_ – an interplay of various forms of art – the piece explored full immersion in light and sound. The artists were not the centre of attention, but through their audiovisual performances, they communicated directly with the audience. For the spatial setup, as well as the line-up, Sonic Acts collaborated with Recombinant Media Labs and its director Naut Humon. Founded in 1991 in Los Angles and setting out to research spatial media, Recombinant Media Labs engages with tactile submersion. The _Sonic Light Box_ was a collective effort: over three evenings more than 40 solo acts and collectives were invited to perform, including Maryanne Amacher, Olivia Block, Don Ritter, Ikue Mori, Hazard (BJ Nilsen), Laminar and Telcoh, among many others.

Continuing investigations into immersive sound, in 2008, The Cinematic Experience festival edition debuted the Acousmonium at Paradiso. The 80-speaker orchestra was designed in 1974 by François Bayle and was originally used by the Ina GRM at the Maison de Radio France in Paris. With different-sized speakers placed at varying heights and distances based on their range, power, quality, and directional characteristics, the Acousmonium aims to bring listeners completely inside the sound. When it was built, Bayle said, ‘It’s like the interior of a sound universe, conceived as another utopia, devoted to pure listening, [...] as a projection area, arranged for the immersion in sound, and a spatialised polyphony.’ [1](#footnotes)

Together with Ina GRM, Sonic Acts presented both existing and newly created works specially developed for the Acousmonium with artists such as Ivo Malec, Christian Fennesz, and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. One of the central works was the new composition _Elemental II_ by Éliane Radigue, her first ever piece for an acoustic instrument, performed on double bass by Kasper T. Toeplitz. The Acousmonium subsequently became part of several programmes, such as at the 2011 instalment of the Kontraste Festival in Krems, Imaginary Landscapes, and at the 2019 and 2022 Sonic Acts festival editions, each time using a different speaker set up. The live performances and diffusions included Jessica Ekomane, Aho Ssan, Thomas Ankersmit, Kees Tazelaar, Okkyung Lee, Beatriz Ferreyra, Olivia Block, and Thomas Lehn & Marcus Schmickler. In 2011 and 2019, Keith Fullerton Whitman showcased _Natural Rhythms_, a work exploring synthesis, utilising an array of techniques indebted to both the analogue and digital history of electronic music. The piece took shape during a week-long residency in the Ina GRM Studio 103, where the artist composed with vintage, regional electronic musical instruments.

In 2010, the thirteenth edition of Sonic Acts festival, The Poetics of Space, investigated more specifically concepts of space within the audiovisual arts, presenting various spatial sound programmes, each with its own focus. The Wave Field Synthesis system (WFS), developed by the Game of Life foundation, became a central feature of the evening programme titled Acoustic Spaces. WFS is a rectangular array of 192 speakers directed towards each other. This vast array of loudspeakers simulates and synthesises virtual acoustic environments, where sound can appear to emanate from invisible starting points and move across many possible pathways. The WFS was installed in Paradiso’s Kleine Zaal and featured compositions by Ji Youn Kang, Alo Allik, and Olivier Messiaen.

In 2019, Sonic Acts unveiled The Pentacle in the entrance hall of the Stedelijk Museum. This system, developed at the former Studio for Electro-Musical Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam by Fedde ten Berge, consists of fifteen self-designed loudspeakers and three subwoofers that creates a sound field. During the event, Ji Youn Kang performed live with two customised bamboo sticks, a small Korean gong, and analogue devices for further real-time processing, exploring musical space in relation to traditional shamanistic rituals. For _Deformation Studies on Dimension and Structure For Fifteen Point Three_, Hugo Esquinca considered the localisation of audio within The Pentacle system, programming according to the acoustic resonances of the museum itself.

As a response to the recurrent lockdowns due to Covid-19, in 2020, Sonic Acts formulated the Listening Room. The diffusion of new multichannel sound works by KMRU, Mint Park, and Felicity Mangan, among others, would facilitate a high-quality listening experience when everything else was closed to the public. Created for an eight- channel speaker set up in a venue that would accommodate the 1.5 metre distance rules for the visitors, the Listening Room has not yet materialised as a public programme, ironically because of the lockdowns and restrictions. Presently, it resides in the archive waiting to be executed as part of the Spatial Sound Platform during the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024.

# Sensing dimensions
Within the archive, there are multiple recordings of performances with self-built instruments, speakers and objects that re-define listening
by traversing the movement of sound and its interaction with the dimensions of a space.

Together with Okkyung Lee on cello, Ellen Fullman performed at Sonic Acts 2012 with The Long String Instrument, an installation of tuned strings that are over fifteen meters long. The drone music she creates relates directly to its surroundings, responding to the microscopic atmospheres and textures of the room that are always in motion.

From horizontal configurations to perpendicular ones – the opposite trajectory is explored in _Vertical Studies: Acoustic Shadows and Boundary Reflections_, a collaborative work by Signe Lidén and Espen Sommer Eide. Instead of constructing an arena with a wide radius, Lidén and Eide invited the audience into a 46-meter-high former water tower in Sint Jansklooster. For this purpose, they built a range of instruments that navigate the vertical dimension, placed inside the tower’s spiral staircase as an ascending sound piece.

Taking shape as a performance and installation at Sonic Acts Biennial in 2022, the _Long Throw_ by Anthea Caddy is comprised of custom-built parabolic speakers that project beams of sound up to three kilometres long and 60 centimetres in circumference. Continually reflecting
and diffracting, the sounds appear as near-invisible physical entities transforming the space into a large resonator.

# Tuning to the world
As part of her talk at Ars Electronica in 1989 in Linz, Maryanne Amacher explained how she installed a self-built microphone at the Boston harbour and connected it to her studio with a radio-telephone line. By listening continuously over a period of three years, she experienced sound’s spatial movement within a landscape, coming from a myriad of directions and channels, and transmitted through the recording device. Amacher captures the distinct, perceptible geography of the harbour – industrial, aquatic, and unidentifiable noises emanate from far away to close by, from almost inaudible to extremely present. Both sound and our perception of it is inherently spatial, operating in 360 degrees. In motion through a landscape, sound is not singular nor neutral, but a plurality of frequencies, expressions, histories, and echoes.

Throughout the lineage of Sonic Acts, we have questioned who and what we amplify, and how can we respond to the escalating climate crisis while simultaneously re-thinking our relationships and entanglements within the world. Taking up documented and processed sounds, multichannel composition often provides a way to give voice to, encounter, tune towards, and allow for complexity to exist while also questioning the position of the recordist and listener. Looking for ways to sense, feel, and (re)connect, we might create new representations that go beyond perceived or established reality.

In 2010, as part of Acoustic Spaces programme at the festival, visitors were invited to enter a dark room for live diffusions by several generations of composers and musicians. During this evening, Hildegard Westerkamp performed _Into the Labyrinth_ (2000), the artist’s first encounter with an eight-channel speaker setup. The piece was created during a fifteen-day residency using field recordings taken by Westerkamp when she journeyed to India in the 1990s. Bike bells, stone cutters, footsteps, crickets, traffic, and music performed in the streets and at sacred places form a new landscape in _Into the Labyrinth_. Westerkamp was a long-time participant in the World Soundscape Project, a collective of artists who banded together in the 1960s and 70s. Initiated by R. Murray Schafer, the collective was interested
in acoustic ecology and the inherent musicality of one’s sounding environment. In an interview with Sonic Acts, she explains how her early practice evolved during the analogue period, meaning she learned to compose by ear. Working for the first time with a multichannel setup invited her to rethink her composition process while simultaneously questioning her own presence in another culture:

> On the one hand, I work with environmental sounds, and I like to keep a connection to the real. On the other hand, there are sound objects that allows you to work in a more musical way. I am really interested in the balance between those two, to play with them and to play with the listener. What does it do to our imagination as we listen? Software is a tool to lead the listener more deeply
in the quality of a recorded sound, its timbre, mood, texture [...] _Into the Labyrinth_ simulates a journey, one where you do not know what is going to happen on the way. [2](#footnotes)

That same night Annea Lockwood performed her composition _Thirst_ (2008) that counterpoints tension and serenity, swinging between Grand Central at rush hour and the sculptor Simone Fattal recanting memories of her grandparents’ courtyard in Damascus, which she describes as a refuge from the pervasive noise of the neoliberal crisis. Attentive to then-contemporaneous trends such as the iPod, in an interview with Sonic Acts, Lockwood explained her use environmental noise:

> Field recording is emerging as an increasingly popular medium. I don’t work exclusively with field recordings, but my compositions are always about environmental sounds, human experiences, water language. Everybody knows the language of water. Environmental sounds are an open language that everybody understands. That’s why I don’t process the sounds because they make instant contact with the listeners. [3](#footnotes)

The artist Jana Winderen uses recording technologies to document extraordinary sounds that are not encountered as part of daily life in otherwise unreachable places. In 2015, as part of The Geological Imagination festival edition, she premiered _Pasvikdalen_, a multichannel surround performance that includes recordings made in the border area between Russia and Norway. The piece was the result of Sonic Acts’ Dark Ecology project, a three-year art, research, and commissioning initiative enacted in collaboration with curator Hilde Methi. Taking place from 2014 to 2016 in the Arctic region, Dark Ecology was deeply connected to the environmental crisis, particularly in its exploration of the impact of human activities on the environment. Consisting of layers of sound, on which the listener can project their own narrative, the piece transmits the everlasting impact of political decisions on the region. Capturing environmental harm wrought about on various geological
and atmospheric scales, _Pasvikdalen_ (a name of the valley in Norway and Russia) translates how pollution caused by the oil drilling industries affects whole ecosystems. Starting out at the Pasvik river, Winderen grasps the textures and movements of transforming elements. Within the piece, we hear the mining of iron and the evaporation of smoke as it condenses into water, which then journeys back into the depths of the Earth.

Focusing on sonic erosion, rhythms, musicality within objects, architecture, and the landscape, BJ Nilsen also invites the audience to stretch their perception of the ‘real’. His live performances recall the way sound composition can alter time and space, transforming a specific location into an imaginary world. Nilsen has presented his work multiple times at Sonic Acts, including in 2003 as part of the _Sonic Light Box_ and in 2010 with his multichannel composition _Solid Curtain_. In 2019, he premiered the composition _ORE_ on the Acousmonium a piece
that excavates the sound of mining. Using field recordings made at locations connected to mining iron ore and coal in the North of Norway and Russia, the piece overlaps layers of time in the landscape, from the deep time of geology to the superfast temporality of commerce. In an interview, he explains how he was first drawn to the resonances of mining and iron ore during a Sonic Acts’ Dark Ecology trip in 2014 to the North of Norway and Russia:
 
> It’s a very interesting region. It’s remote, there’s a lot of heavy industry, mines, problems with pollution, as well as an impressive sub-Arctic nature. The effects of climate change are much more present in daily life. The excursion started in the main factory hall of the plant in Kirkenes where they process the iron ore, and then descend into the ‘black hole’ down into the mountain. It was a 45-minute walk down into the tunnels. [...] You hear all these low frequency sounds. They drill and hack the ore out from the mountain and bring it on a conveyor belt up to the machine hall where its ground into a fine dust. [...] There are so many layers: there is dust everywhere, footprints on the floor, a lot of visual information and hardly any colour. Just different monochromatic tones of grey and black. [4](#footnotes)



# Collective resonance
Sonic Acts’ focus on pluralism, relationality, and artistic creation as a communal endeavour resulted in collective experiments and prolonged improvisations that explore how sound is perceived in space.

In 2004, at the opening night of Unsorted festival edition, which focused on new forms of art emerging as a response to the information society, the twelve performers of MIMEO (Music In Movement Electronic Orchestra) surrounded the audience for a four-hour improvisation investigating the room’s acoustic and social restraints. They alternated various forms of amplification, such as stereo, a quadraphonic speaker set up, or no amplification at all. In relation to each other, they uncovered the spectrum of the auditory space as it emerged through analogue and digital tools. The iconic international ensemble is made up of improvisers who began working in the 1960s alongside a younger generation of electronic musicians. The collective included Christian Fennesz, Cor Fuhler, Gert-Jan Prins, Jérôme Noetinger, Kaffe Matthews, Keith Rowe, Marcus Schmickler, Markus Wettstein, Peter Rehberg, Phil Durrant, Rafael Toral, and Thomas Lehn.

In 2013, The Dark Universe festival edition kicked off with an opening event at Stedelijk Museum centred on the unknown properties of seeing and hearing. The sound installation _freq_out 9_, conceptualised by Carl Michael von Hausswolff, was distributed in the upper hall. Twelve speakers diffused twelve individual works at the same time, each composed within a specific frequency range, made on site, and amplified to act as a single, generative sound-space. Artists BJ Nilsen, JG Thirlwell, Jacob Kirkegaard, Jana Winderen, Maia Urstad, Kent Tankred, Finnbogi Pétursson, PerMagnus Lindborg, Christine Ödlund, Franz Pomassl, Mike Harding, Tommi Grönlund & Petteri Nisunen, and Carl Michael von Hausswolff, were each allotted frequency ranges within the audible sound spectrum. Without a beginning or an end, the sounds exist in a constant flow, taking on sculptural forms. Because the sound frequencies are different, there are no collisions between individual pieces, the only interference arises when two or more sound waves occupy the same space and affect one another. The formulation is comparable to individual instruments playing together in a large symphony orchestra. The final mix not only reveals the innate properties of the frequencies, but also the possibilities when they are combined. Each participant works individually, without consulting anyone else, but all those involved must be able to accept what the others produce.

# Hearing
The works in the Sonic Acts archive regard the listener as an active participant whose experience is as vital as the creation itself. In the dark, whether standing, lying down, or in motion, the listener’s aural engagement in the moment often becomes an integral part of each musical encounter.

Examining the properties of hearing and a physiological phenomenon called ‘otoacoustic emissions’ – sounds that are emitted from the ear without external stimulation – the ground-breaking work of Maryanne Amacher has been presented several times at Sonic Acts. Appearing
as a solo act as part of the _Sonic Light Box_, she has also performed together with collaborators such as Recombinant Media Labs, while Edwin van der Heide played her piece at the ARTIS Planetarium (housed in Amsterdam’s zoo). Taking shape as a series of iterative reinterpretations throughout the Stedelijk Museum, her compositions were also showcased as part of the Mini Sound Series by Supreme Connections. Since the early days of her practice, she has been exploring spatial perception and dimension, staging sound architecturally and composing with the auditory experience itself.

Amacher’s ‘ear tone’ music emerged from the creative use of difference tones, along with otoacoustic emissions (known, in shorthand,
as OAEs). For the multichannel installation _Labyrinthitis_ by Jacob Kirkegaard, presented in 2010, the artist recorded OAEs generated by his own ears, amplifying them in such a way that they recreate tones in the listeners’ ears.

Furthering these experiments, Jonáš Gruska’s _Žaburina_ explored psychoacoustic phenomena with a self-built system of rotating PA horns, traditionally used for announcements in Slovakian villages and repurposed as a sound distribution system that adapts to the architecture of each space. Premiering at Sonic Acts Academy 2020, the artist describes the composition as the imaginary folk music of underwater nations. Polymetric rhythms are used as compositional tools that expand through the multichannel system or overlap in complex, non-Western scales.
 

# Listening anew
Lending an ear to the recordings in the archive today, the history of spatial sound within the Sonic Acts archive can be interpreted as a pluralistic endeavour characterised by bold artistic experimentation. Over three decades, Sonic Acts has continuously renewed its commitment to delving the potentials of technical developments, focusing on immersive experiences, as well as the dimensions and sensibilities of a space, the hearing apparatus and engagement of the listener, and the position of the performer/artist as entangled with the world.

Contextualised by ongoing questioning regarding the role and status of media archives, the Sonic Acts archives are regarded with renewed relevance. They are not to be approached as a collection, but as a gathering of imprints. Taking shape organically, urged by the desire to capture and document and as a way to recognise the performances’ significance, the works contained within the archive transmit stories and experiences across time, resonating from the past and into the present. But who do they belong to today? And how can we make them accessible to artists, researchers and future generations? This essay aims to instigate and make the content known, allowing it to be a generative force for new artistic experiments. Within this process, there is an imperative to reflect critically. Afterall, engaging with archives is never a neutral act, but rather a continuous practice of transmitting and receiving.

Listening Anew

A co-commission from Sonic Acts and Semibreve, _Shifted in Dreams_ is an album released in 2023 by Shelter Press, recomposed by Kassel Jaeger. 

In this performance he recombines the original sound materials from the album and metamorphoses them into a new form, like a recurring dream, returning night after night, but in a divergent way each time. For the new visual accompaniment, Jaeger invited Eléonore Huisse, creator of the album's artwork and the filmmaker behind the celebrated documentary _Eliane Radigue – Echos_ (2021). While the film is constructed in response to the recomposed soundtrack, Jaeger's live performance is established as a somnambulant walk through the filmmaker's images, wandering on the fringes of contemplation and sleep.

**Kassel Jaeger** (François J. Bonnet) is a Franco-Swiss composer, writer and theorist currently based in Paris and, since 2018, has directed INA GRM, the renowned musical research group housed by France’s National Audiovisual Institute. 

**Eléonore Huisse** is a French cinematographer and photographer residing in Paris, France, Her work, which contemplates and captures auratic moments, has been screened in places such as Whitney Museum of American Art, MaerzMusik/Berliner Festspiele, Semibreve, Public Access in NYC or Institut Français d'Athènes.

[kasseljaeger.com](https://kasseljaeger.com)

### Presentation
Sonic Acts Biennial 2024\
24 February 2024\
Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam\
[2024.sonicacts.com](https://2024.sonicacts.com/programme/shifted-in-dreams-redreamed)

Shifted in Dreams

The following interview comes from the sixth issue of _Ecoes_, Sonic Acts' periodic magazine about art in the age of pollution. Read this and much more in print by pre-ordering a copy from our [webshop](https://shop.sonicacts.com/product/ecoes-6/).

Don't miss **Tarek Atoui** during Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 events. Find the artist at both the [Michel Waisvisz: Touched by Sound](https://2024.sonicacts.com/programme/michel-waisvisz-project) talks and concert programmes, as well as a special [masterclass](https://2024.sonicacts.com/programme/workshops) on musical scores.

As part of a long-term collaboration with Sonic Acts, Tarek Atoui and Kristina Andersen have spent days unboxing objects, documents, and
fascinating musical tools contained within the archive of Michel Waisvisz (1949–2008). The project takes up the legacy of this unique Dutch
artist, composer, and instrument maker, evoking his important oeuvre to inspire new forms of experimentation. The historical materials, both
physical and ephemeral, are positioned in dialogue with an emerging generation of artists and former collaborators and, in this way, transformed in the present day. In conversation with Sally-Jane Norman, Atoui and Andersen reflect on engaging with the archive and staying true to the spirit of Waisvisz. As the process unfolded, they came to figuratively understand the collection in terms of ‘orality’, or the tradition of passing down knowledge through spoken communication. While codifying creative practices requires staying true to fixed-forms, orality offers a fluid, open, ever-adapting approach.

Michel Waisvisz was a pioneer in the international world of technological art, electronic sound art, and performance. Based on his experiences of playing with short wave radio as a child, he developed electronic and (later) digital instruments and software that transform bodily movements into sound. Works including the Crackle Box (1974) and Crackle Synth (1974), both pressure-sensitive, touchable devices, and The Hands (1984), twin MIDI controllers that can be attached to the player’s palms, garnered him international acclaim. His influence only increased after becoming the artistic director of the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam in the 1980s. 

Diverging from and encircling the archive, new musical instruments have been commissioned by Sonic Acts alongside reeditions of Waisvisz’s innovative inventions. Functioning as gestures, the instruments and archival materials will initiate communal narratives, introduced through workshops, conversations, lectures, and performances during the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024: The Spell of the Sensuous. On March 3, at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam, a programme of talks and collective improvisations will take place. Themed around the concept of ‘touching sound’ in relation to sampling and the crackle instruments, the featured artists include Boris Shershenkov, Görkem Arikan, Takuro Mizuta Lippit, Kristina Andersen, Ji Youn Kang, Julia Giertz, Tarek Atoui, and others. 

Performance scholar-practitioner Sally-Jane Norman, who served as STEIM’s artistic guest director from 1998 to 2000, engages in conversation with Atoui and Andersen. Her professional background and creative practice share deep connections with Waisvisz, with whom she collaborated personally. Together, they orchestrated the very first instalment of the Touch Festival, a gathering facilitating haptic, tactile encounters through discursive events, presentations, and more.

**Sally-Jane Norman: Can you explain how this project arose?**

**Tarek Atoui:** I always wanted to do it and Sonic Acts provided an opportunity. I contacted Kristina with my idea, asking whether she knew where Michel’s stuff was.

**Kristina Andersen:** And I knew!

**TA:** I had no clue how much effort and care you’d made after Michel’s passing. All the work you did – digitising, thinking, storing as much as possible, and throwing away anything unnecessary.

**KA:** That’s the weird thing about archiving – it’s as much about getting rid of things as it is about preserving. For some things we have initial sketches, drawings, circuitry, sound recordings from concerts. It’s not complete, but it’s complementary, and it spans a very long period and every single form of digital media you can imagine.

**SJN: You said ‘we’. Are there others involved you wish to name?**

**KA:** I worked with a lot of people over the years. I spent Sundays in the basement with Takuro Mizuta Lippit, aka dj sniff, STEIM’s artistic director from 2008 to 2013. We’d come out blackened with data from the analogue audio tapes – literally wearing the sound! Sound artist Andi Otto wrote a thesis on The Hands, and in his search for the evidence we shifted through a lot of material. Interns would come in for one or two weeks. We would also write the occasional academic paper on The Crackle, on the interactive exhibition presented at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1975, or The Hands. Together, these situations led to a practical approach to archiving – not as a big overarching project, but a series of little incursions.

**SJN: How do you keep Michel’s legacy alive? How does his body of work and artistic vision circulate with contemporary practitioners?**

**TA:** His ideas are still very much alive through people close to Michel, who made instruments, controllers, and concerts in the way he did, or through the technology, and his legacy of making and building. Michel’s philosophy also continues as a kind of playfulness. He believed that we must approach these materials differently: How can we use a circuit board, a photo, or a recording in a livelier way? 

Michel was important to me. He’s someone I’ve hugely cited in a lot of work I do. I also see his infuence in younger people who didn’t know him. For example, a young instrument maker in China who’s making dozens of versions of crackle boxes. Or people who make software, who are thinking about human-machine interaction, about instruments powered by solar energy, and non-electric sources... All these subjects are present in Michel’s work. So there must be a playful way to go back and explore it. I used to enjoy playing and having fun with Michel.

Ideas started to materialise when I looked at the collection with Kristina. We’d say, OK, this is a circuit board, could we share an image of this piece of circuitry with someone and ask them to imagine what it was meant to control? Or give someone a photo of a performance and ask them to try and build the instrument? We have plenty of ideas like these: How can we revisit instruments, unfinished ideas, photos, documents? All the materials have meaning and potential to generate meaning, or to trigger information beyond musicological, academic, or
usual frameworks.

**SJN: Is it a mix between speculative approaches and very physical anchorage?**

TA: Objects crystallise ideas, intentions, thoughts. But beyond physical objects, we also have recordings and spools. We’re interested in building instruments based on the spools. There’s an audio file of Michel playing The Hands at different moments over the years. So, what if we were to take this audio file and ask young builders to make controllers? It’s not just a question of objects, it’s a question of how we use the sound file, the photo, the score, the sketch. In the long term, there is scope for development across multiple chapters and iterations. This is just a start.

**SJN: How does the programme for the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 fit in with what’s clearly a long-term undertaking?**

**TA:** We are preparing a series of workshops, concerts, and talks with a focus on the restoration of certain elements, as well as the re-edition, digitisation, and scanning of archival materials. It’s a question of setting the ground, generating material that will feed into the programme. There are also one or two instruments we’re building, inspired by Michel’s inventions. Kristina and I will be hosts, but the programme is being put together with a group of people who are participating. We invited people with whom we were in conversation, including friends and younger creatives from the now defunct STEIM, for an evening of talks and concerts, sharing memories and playing music. It’s about creating a place where we can come together and discuss ideas.

**SJN: Is there a longer-term time frame? It sounds as though this is going to evolve quite naturally, serendipitously?**

**KA:** Having spent ffteen years on this, I’m coming at it as formal caretaker of the archive, but also as an academic and designer. At the end of the day, the archive is something I’ll deal with for a long time, perhaps forever. There’s an inherent impossibility in archiving – you can never find the right solution; you can never be done. We are trying to look over our shoulders with respect and love for what came before, but also with a real eye to what Michel would have said: _maak wat van_ (make something out of it). For me, there’s a dilemma between making new things, but also wanting to hold onto some of the spirit that Michel brought to our lives. 

The stuff he left behind is conceptually rich, but not always technologically dependable. Sometimes it was just a matter of making things work in the moment. Michel’s philosophy of ‘let’s figure it out!’ is what we’re missing right now, and I think it could be helpful again.

**TA:** All the important things I’ve done have taken years to achieve. If you want to build things, it’s about giving them the possibility to fow, to evolve. Kristina, I’d like to know where are you with establishing the archive formally through a foundation? And how has that plan evolved through our project?

**KA:** I’m taking an instinctual embodied approach to the instruments. Right now, my kitchen is full of crackle speakers! Kees van Zeelst and Nico Bes, both longstanding STEIM people, helped me open them, and they’re all completely different on the inside. One of them had been used as a storage box! Each one will appear on stage differently because they’ve been modifed over and over. One of them doesn’t have a speaker cone. Somebody probably needed a speaker on a Sunday afternoon, so they took it. There’s something about that attitude that corresponds with Michel’s artistic character. I’m using this project to think about the longevity of the archive. In the longer-term, we will start a small, simple foundation to take care of its best interests, while being very aware that this is a complicated job that we will need to keep engaging with.

**TA:** The question of what an estate or a legacy means today is hugely important. Yet, it’s an undertaking that requires large scale organisation. Countries like the Netherlands often brag about their emphasis on preservation and the attention they pay to culture, legacy, heritage, yet very little of Michel’s work has been acknowledged. So, it’s great that, along with Sonic Acts, we’re able to create a framework to rectify this. We are not prepared to surrender to a certain context that won’t give this work the chance to exist for us and for others.

**KA:** I’m not looking at fling things away, but rather allowing them to continue to emerge. I’m interested in allowing objects, instruments, technology, memories, pieces of music, compositions, pictures to transition and take on multiple defnitions simultaneously. Physical objects allow us to deal with complexity. We’re dealing with tangible materials. For me, it’s about being able to engage – not necessarily with what Michel would or wouldn’t have done, but to engage with what might happen now. At the core, what we’re asking is: What does it mean to archive a live art practice?

**SJN: You’re talking about the layered repairs and (re)interventions that build sedimented histories. These can’t be finite objects because they’re already evidence of multiple iterations, and the notion of finitude runs completely counter to everything that Michel stood for. The process of intervening must be in the ‘now’ to see what these objects elicit today.**

**KA:** We must create space. If we care for every single object, if we remember and want to showcase everything, we can’t think of anything new. It’s a balance. I recently transported three sets of The Hands to Rotterdam for an exhibition. It’s complicated because two sets have quicksilver switches. If they break, it’s not only impossible to replace them, but we also don’t want mercury to spill everywhere. There is always a risk when we move things, which means we are somewhat selective about what leaves the archive and travels around.

**SJN: So how do you avoid turning The Hands into holy relics?**

**KA:** By not showing them all the time! They’re not meaningful for most people. They can’t be played by anyone else. Lots of things weren’t recorded and lots were lost. For this project we’re talking mostly about the very early stuff – aeroplanes, maps, and drawings. There’s an unacademic richness there; it’s not theoretical.

**TA:** Yes, we’re talking about the vocabulary that arose around the crackle boxes, the early works, some ideas to do with sampling, but focusing more on the record, the trace, the surface.

**KA:** In a sense, this is not really an archiving project. We met and picked out several boxes to look at in both a guided and unguided way. We ended up spending a day unpacking and laying the contents of one box out on the foor. When I returned the next day, Tarek had made a wonderful edit of the material, arranging it in a new configuration. What became interesting was not the objects themselves, but how they were
assembled.

**TA:** After a day and a half of unpacking, taking items out of boxes which were roughly categorised as ‘scores’, ‘records’, ‘drawings’, ‘spools’, ‘minidisks’, ‘notebooks’, and so on, we really started putting it all together. The approach emerged out of the correspondences I noticed. It became clear that these traces are like chapters or sections, and there could be multiple versions. I feel that if we did this again, Kristina, we’d come up with another collage.

**KA:** We’re not looking for a final truth. It doesn’t really exist.

**TA:** It’s about playability and playfulness. Each time we look at something it might generate another possibility.

**SJN: Kristina, you say it’s not an archiving project. How could it be succinctly described it in a way that’s satisfactory for you?**

**KA:** It’s about allowing things to happen that shouldn’t be possible, that may be before or even after their time. Tarek and I have very different trajectories and vocabularies – I have an urgent, personal need to deal with this body of work. After years and years, I realise it’s not archivable in a traditional sense. I don’t think any live art practice is, so we’re trying to engage with the material in a way that I don’t want to label, that’s true to the spirit of the material.

**SJN: The relationships between the objects and materials seem to be as important as, or even more important than, their own individual existences. Can you say more about how the work you’re doing might have a lasting impact amongst emerging practitioners, artists, and scholars?**

**TA:** The performance evening at the Bimhuis, where we will all come together, will be a moment of refection and research. It won’t be the rendering of a final outcome. I want to create a situation where we can be inspired in different ways. If it’s an instrument, great; a gathering of people, great; a sound, perfect. The workshops won’t be just ‘educational’ type presentations, they are opportunities for learning through conversations. If we revisit Michel’s scores as a group, it won’t be a matter of ‘presenting’ them, but of thinking about them together as an assembly.

**KA:** Within the project there are notions of gesture, assembly, kinship. We’re not trying to remake or preserve; we’re trying to make things that have a kind of kinship with Michel’s work.

**SJN: Kristina, those characteristics you’ve just mentioned – gesture, assembly, kinship – are also very much features of your own workshops.**

**KA:** Yeah, of course, we’re fellow travellers in many complex ways. We are all family and kin. It means that we do things, we come together, we gather in subsets, we’re all engaged in this prolonged relationship with each other.

**SJN: So there’s a nexus, a kind of holding point around which you converge, but also, you can take these energies in very different directions.**

**TA:** What’s been left behind resembles oral traditions. In Arabic culture, orality is fundamental not because text has been scarce; on the contrary, it’s due to the desire to avoid fxed forms, whether in poetry or in music. Orality allows the content or message to adapt to the vocabulary of the time. Arab poets and musicians did not feel compelled to transmit fxated works to future generations, but rather, they wanted to communicate an idea, concept, or intention, so it could be modelled and adapted to the era in which it’s being interpreted. We see it in the music: it isn’t scripted, the instrument changes, the technology changes. The scale is there to keep it together, but what can be done in the scale is left open. 

This approach shares parallels with what we’ve experienced in this process. We’re dealing with materials and elements that were not meant to be archived in a classical sense. They weren’t meant to be classifed in a museum. They often arose as the result of a spontaneous situation: Let’s do a concert, let’s collaborate, let’s come together. Michel’s scores were always adapting to different contexts. He didn’t have a methodology like some composers who have a very singular vocabulary and aesthetic. Instead, he was driven by the way people relate to a
score and understand it in the moment. Moreover, Michel used graphic scores, instructional pieces, and software code, and these all arouse from oral processes. 

It’s like archiving craft – the crackle speakers are put together hastily, they’re fxed on the spot, a piece might be removed from one and put on
another. They’ve never been considered as artworks. They are objects which are a form of and refect this sense of orality. So they need to be kept in a form that is not museum-like. How do we preserve the Crackle Box? The idea behind redoing the crackle speaker, but using today’s technology and today’s vocabulary, is not to produce or reproduce the same object. This motivates interventions such as taking photo of one of Michel’s performances and asking an instrument maker to make an instrument that can play it.

When I get asked about the context, my answer is that it’s not the point – the point is simply to observe the photo and create from there. At STEIM, when I ask someone to make an instrument based on their experiences, I’m not interested in them doing academic research and
finding out technical things. That isn’t the nature of the invitation. I’m trying to take a more poetic approach to everything we do as part of this project. When we come together in March 2024, creating a situation that allows other voices to emerge will be the most important aspect. What is the role of an instrument? They’re objects that allow convening, assembling, coming together and therefore, they are potent in the sense they can generate other opportunities for the future. 

I told you about taking the sounds of the old instruments and making new instruments based on them. At some point there will be institutions that will want to acquire the new pieces. But the problem is that what was initially a very open object, like a sound file, which was open to interpretation, will become a fnite object. Institutions come with specific requests about how to preserve, maintain, and integrate objects into their collections in order to make them accessible to musicians and practitioners. But what will happen when you’re dead, or in 200 years when the technology around the instrument will be obsolete, how will it operate then? Of course, you can fix it as best you can. But my answer would be to find another instrument maker to construct something new out of it. It’s about repeating the gesture, rather than preserving the object. That’s what orality is. How can I create different functions with different materials and not be stuck in a given time? This allows for an expansive archive that doesn’t get stuck on old dead icons.

**SJN: I love this notion of the orality and openness to reinterpretation and the way you circled back to gesture!**

**KA:** We are repeating the gesture, rather than preserving the object. Gesture and intention over preservation and instruction. This type of art making, music making, and instrument building requires a process that’s much more craft-like and linked to oral traditions. In a sense, it’s much older than an archaeological or archival impulse. This brings us back to teaching – our pedagogical strategy is concerned with showing what’s possible, and from that, allowing a much broader range of things to be possible.

**TA:** There’s a fundamental problem with education. Students are asked to find answers to questions that teachers have already formulated. We should allow people to learn to formulate their own questions. The attitude we have today is full of preconceived notions. There are countless definitions and lots of things that are being taken for granted. People should not be relying unquestioningly on fixed terms and conventions. I’m learning a lot from the obstacles we’re encountering with the archive. Maybe we should keep the documents and the photos as they were. I could assemble the unboxed materials into another collage, fnding other connections, other associations, and the form would be different. That’s precisely the power of the archive. It’s a little bit like the improvisations I recorded with Michel.

**KA:** We’re doing an improvised archiving. We’re learning to deal with the materials coherently – re-enacting, paying attention, and listening – attuned to the way the work was made in the first place.

**TA:** I’m super excited about the complexity we are facing; the questions of what to show and how to show it. I’m fascinated by the idea of making complex circuitry from basic elements or building big, absurd machines. When I’m teaching, I always use a microphone, mixer, and
speaker combined in different ways. The components are basic, but the results are complex. If the setup is too complicated, it will not be accessible to everybody. This allows me to redo an installation with kids, but to keep the same essence as when I work with adults. Children have their own intuitive approach, while experienced makers might bring along an Arduino, stress sensors, and other more sophisticated equipment. But the core components are always the same. This keeps the concept open and transmissible through time.

**SJN: When you describe creating situations that are open to different readings and temporalities, I see this as a kind of ethic.**

**TA:** It’s also about an attitude, about being ethical towards Michel’s materials. We don’t want to subjugate the material for the purpose of an exhibition or project. In fact, we’re trying to adopt an ethical attitude while also being highly selective. Approaching the archive through the notion of orality is not about being lazy. I’m sure some people might say we took this route because we’re not able to do it otherwise. On the
contrary, Kristina did an amazing job of putting things together in a way that is scientific. It was not about preserving everything exactly as we found it. We now have the result of a very complex process that has involved different phases of archiving. Our method cannot be described as prescriptive. In fact, it was the opposite. We uncovered the orality of the archive in the process of unpacking, fxing, scripting, and sorting
the materials.

**KA:** We also uncovered a sense of a fundamental and deadly serious curiosity in the archive. We’re not doing this because we’re bored or because it seems useful. We are desperately curious. We’re looking because it’s urgent to find things.

→ Pre-order a copy of _Ecoes_ from the [Sonic Acts webshop](https://shop.sonicacts.com/product/ecoes-6/)

Unboxing the Archive of Michel Waisvisz

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Spatial Sound Platform

Sonic Acts is looking for two Communications Managers for 28 hours per week. The deadline for applications is 14 October and applicants should be ready to start working by the beginning of December.

# About us
Sonic Acts is a leading platform for new developments in electronic and digital art and sound art. Along with a year-round programme, the organisation is notable for its Biennial, which takes place at a variety of locations in Amsterdam. Sonic Acts supports research, development and presentation of cutting-edge music, visual art, science, and technology in concerts, lectures, club music, film screenings, workshops, exhibitions, and more.

Based in Amsterdam, Sonic Acts works with national and international artists, partners, and kindred cultural and academic institutions. The organisation has an ambitious attitude and strives for innovation and exceptional artistic quality in all of its activities.


# Responsibilities
As Communications Manager, you will be responsible for communicating, promoting, and marketing Sonic Acts’ programmes. This includes both online and offline communications, as well as managing relationships with media partners and audiences. 

Responsibilities include managing campaigns for Sonic Acts programmes from start to finish across various channels – including the website, mailing, PR, social media – which means: 

- Translating programmes into accessible and engaging communication, including website copy, social media posts, email newsletters, press releases, etc.;
- Collaborating with designers and artists to oversee the content creation of visually appealing and multimedia-rich assets;
- Managing and maintaining content management systems (CMS) and ensuring content is organised and easily accessible for future use;
- Monitoring timelines and goals for campaigns, including advertising and PR;
- Communicating projects through media partnerships and relevant contacts in the Dutch cultural sector;
- Monitoring content performance metrics, such as website traffic and engagement rates, and making data-driven recommendations and reports.


# Requirements
- Completed higher education; 
- 3 years of relevant work experience;
- Excellent communication, writing and editing skills in English (fluency in Dutch is a plus);
- Experience in the development and implementation of marketing and communications plans and strategies;
- Knowledge of relevant systems and tools – Strapi, Mailchimp, Slack, Basecamp, Homerun, Typeform, Eventix…
- A relevant local network in media, music, art, and culture; 
- Living in or able to travel to Amsterdam;
- A proactive and flexible attitude with a sense of responsibility that is not always limited to office hours; 
- A strong affinity for AV and contemporary visual art, avant-garde film, electronic music, experimental media, and critical discourse.


# Offer
- Creative and challenging job for 28 hours per week in an innovative cultural organisation located in Amsterdam;
- Collaborative and inspiring environment of co-workers, partners, and artists;
- Combination of online work and work in the office; 
- Salary between €2.767 and €3.233 gross per month based on full-time employment, depending on knowledge and experience – based on the guidelines of De Zaak Nu. Freelance is also possible.


Sonic Acts endorses the Fair Practice Code and the Code of Cultural Diversity and is committed to improving the assortment of voices that make up its organisation. Applicants from all (cultural) backgrounds are encouraged to apply. In a case of equal suitability, preference goes to the candidate that strengthens the diversity of the team.

Submit your CV and motivation **before 14 October 2024** via [Homerun](https://sonicacts.homerun.co/communications-manager-3/en). For any questions, please contact us at vacancies@sonicacts.com. 

Vacancies: Sonic Acts is looking for Communications Managers

Sonic Acts is excited to announce the fourth edition of [Underexposed](https://sonicacts.com/archive/underexposed), a mentorship and training programme designed to support young artists in the early stages of their career. This year, up to three artists aged 22 to 32 and based in the Netherlands will be selected to participate in the programme, which runs online from 11 November to 20 December 2024. The deadline for [applications](https://sonicacts.homerun.co/underexposed/en) is Monday, 7 October 2024.

Underexposed is an opportunity for emerging artists to refine their work, with a particular focus on text and conceptualising an artistic project. The training aims to enhance participants' project and budget management skills, particularly for grant applications and public presentations. Over six weeks, they will engage in one-hour weekly online sessions with the Sonic Acts curatorial team, receiving tailored feedback, support, and insights to address their specific needs.

At the end of the programme, all participants, mentors, and affiliated partners come together to meet in person and listen to each others’ project presentations, discussing their way forward as a group.


Artists who have previously benefited from this intensive mentorship are **Angeliki Diakrousi** and **Yara Said** in [2021](https://sonicacts.com/archive/selections-underexposed-2021), followed by **Erik Peters** and duo **Anguille Vannamei** (**Sarah Fitterer** and **Noam Youngrak Son**) in [2022](https://sonicacts.com/archive/selections-underexposed-2022), and **Lance Layoan**, **Sandipan Nath**, and **Yeon Sung** in [2023](https://sonicacts.com/archive/selections-underexposed-2023). Find out more about past participants and read their interviews from _Ecoes_ magazine in our [archive](https://sonicacts.com/archive/filter/longreads).

→ visit [Homerun](https://sonicacts.homerun.co/underexposed/en) to find out more & apply

Applications Open for Underexposed Mentorship Programme 2024

Sonic Acts is proud to announce the Insurgent Learning Workshop! Led by Music Research Strategist **Marshall Trammell** and co-facilitated by multidisciplinary artist **Ghenwa noiré** of SALWA Foundation, the workshop takes place at the end of September and beginning of November, both online and in Amsterdam. 


The workshop specifically highlights the history of the Levant – the core territory of the Middle East – to understand the ongoing struggle in the region and its connection to post-colonial North Africa. It is oriented towards individuals, aged 18 and older, with creative skills who have experienced displacement and have migratory backgrounds from the Levantine region and North Africa, and it is open to up to twenty participants. We encourage applicants with different types of artistic practices who want to engage in a collective journey.

This iteration of the workshop, titled _Pedagogy of the Surveilled_, focuses on working with personal histories as a way to resist surveillance. Through a communal archival practice, the participants will sharpen their ‘cultural weaponry’ by expanding the breadth and depth of their beloved culture and heritage, and intercultural life in host countries. As experts in their own stories, they will share the collective research on immigration in relation to technological developments and the current political atmosphere.     

This project takes shape through in-depth research into storytelling and story-sharing. Together, the participants and artists will look towards international examples, such as digital community archives, and bring them into relation with their stories. Personal archives will be explored through graphic score-making – or the representation of music using visual symbols other than traditional notation – but also poetry, sound art, and improvised music. 

The Insurgent Learning Workshop has previously engaged with various communities, including sessions in Albuquerque, Bergen (Borealis Festival), Vancouver (Western Front), Kansas City (Charlotte Street Foundation), Austin (The Museum of Human Achievement), San Francisco (Southern Exposure), and Oakland (Pro Arts Gallery & Commons).



**WHEN**

Online session: 26 September, 18:30–19:30

Workshop session: 3, 4 & 5 October (all day)

Online session: 17 October, 18:30–20:30

Workshop session: 31 October & 1–2 November (all day)

The location (in Amsterdam) will be shared with the confirmed participants. 

**APPLY**

Apply for the workshop via [Typeform](https://sonicacts.typeform.com/to/VikNIgxk). 

Registrations are open until 20 September and the number of participants is limited to up to 20. The participants will be contacted before 24 September to confirm their participation. 

The workshop is free of charge. Food will be provided for all sessions. 


Insurgent Learning Workshop – Pedagogy of the Surveilled

This week, we release two new thought-provoking videos and podcast episodes on [Sonic Acts channels](https://linktr.ee/sonicactsmedia). These recordings from this year’s [Biennial Symposium](https://2024.sonicacts.com/programme/symposium/symposium) discuss urgent themes of climate catastrophe and connection, and the complex interplay of multi-species feeling, language, and justice.

_Holdfast (Learning Feeling)_ by author and researcher **Astrida Neimanis** is a lecture in five parts. ‘Like a long poem’, it navigates through the delicate and intricate nature of feeling in an era marked by extinction and crisis. Neimanis asks profound questions about how we care for each other across species and in death, and how our feelings shift in response to change.

The second episode we published is a conversation between Astrida Neimanis, feminist science and technology studies scholar **M Murphy**, and artist **Sissel Marie Tonn**. Recorded at the Symposium, this dialogue addresses many topics from pollution and harm, to language, creative methods, and ecological attunement. Answering questions from the audience, they grapple with the complexities of catastrophe and genocide, exchanging thoughts about mourning and action.

In case you missed it – M Murphy’s lecture, _Lessons from Birds Song: Land/Body Desires in the Aftermath_, is also available online.

Astrida Neimanis & M Murphy in Conversation with Sissel Marie Tonn

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Ecoes #3

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Ecoes #5

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All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film

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Open Call: Insurgent Learning Workshop

Marshall Trammell

Performer & Multimedia Installation Practitioner

Ghenwa noiré

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Sissel Marie Tonn

Astrida Neimanis

Feminist Science & Technology Studies Scholar

M Murphy

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Sonic Acts presents the Insurgent Learning Workshop led by Music Research Strategist **Marshall Trammell** and co-facilitated by multidisciplinary performance artist **Ghenwa noiré** of SALWA Foundation


From the end of September to the beginning of November, participants will attend six live meetings in Amsterdam and two online. During these sessions, they will transform their stories of resistance and evolving diaries of displacement into improvised music, focusing on bringing agency into their personal histories.

The workshop specifically highlights the history of the Levant – the core territory of the Middle East – to understand the ongoing struggle in the region and its connection to post-colonial North Africa. It is oriented towards individuals, aged 18 and older, with creative skills who have experienced displacement and have migratory backgrounds from the Levantine region and North Africa, and it is open to up to twenty participants. We encourage applicants with different types of artistic practices who want to engage in a collective journey.

This iteration of the workshop, titled _Pedagogy of the Surveilled_, focuses on working with personal histories as a way to resist surveillance. Through a communal archival practice, the participants will sharpen their ‘cultural weaponry’ by expanding the breadth and depth of their beloved culture and heritage, and intercultural life in host countries. As experts in their own stories, they will share the collective research on immigration in relation to technological developments and the current political atmosphere.     

This project takes shape through in-depth research into storytelling and story-sharing. Together, the participants and artists will look towards international examples, such as digital community archives, and bring them into relation with their stories. Personal archives will be explored through graphic score-making – or the representation of music using visual symbols other than traditional notation – but also poetry, sound art, and improvised music. 

The Insurgent Learning Workshop has previously engaged with various communities, including sessions in Albuquerque, Bergen (Borealis Festival), Vancouver (Western Front), Kansas City (Charlotte Street Foundation), Austin (The Museum of Human Achievement), San Francisco (Southern Exposure), and Oakland (Pro Arts Gallery & Commons).


**WHEN**

Online session: 26 September, 18:30–19:30

Workshop session: 3, 4 & 5 October (all day)

Online session: 17 October, 18:30–20:30

Workshop session: 31 October & 1–2 November (all day)

The location (in Amsterdam) will be shared with the confirmed participants.

**APPLY**

Apply for the workshop via [Typeform](https://sonicacts.typeform.com/to/VikNIgxk).

Registration is possible until the start of first online workshop session on 26 September at 18:30. Early applicants will be contacted before 24 September to confirm their participation. 'Last minute' applicants will be notified as quickly as possible before the online session begins.

**The workshop is free**. Food will be provided for all sessions.

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Sonic Acts invites young artists, aged 22 to 32 and based in the Netherlands, to apply for the fourth round of [Underexposed](https://sonicacts.com/archive/underexposed), a mentorship and training programme that provides early career support. Up to three candidates will be selected for the Underexposed programme this year, which runs remotely from 11 November to 20 December. Applications are due before Monday 7 October.

# About Underexposed

[Underexposed](https://sonicacts.com/archive/underexposed) focuses on supporting young artists in conceptualising their work, mostly in text or writing, and helps them improve the way they present artistic concepts, projects, plans, and budgets in grant applications and other (public) presentations. Over the course of the six-week mentorship programme, artists work directly with members of the Sonic Acts curatorial team in one-hour weekly online sessions where the team provides feedback, support, and insight into the artist’s specific needs.

Previous Underexposed graduates include Angeliki Diakrousi and Yara Said in [2021](https://sonicacts.com/archive/selections-underexposed-2021), Erik Peters and Anguille Vannamei (Noam Youngrak Son and Sarah Fitterer) in [2022](https://sonicacts.com/archive/selections-underexposed-2022), and Lance Layoan, Sandipan Nath, and Yeon Sung in [2023](https://sonicacts.com/archive/selections-underexposed-2023).

# Programme
- Writing an effective artistic proposal/grant application
- Developing realistic planning and a production budget
- Working on the artist’s portfolio
- Exploring local and international presentation and commissioning opportunities
- Creating a presentation and a project plan
- An in-person gathering of all 2024 programme participants and mentors, with presentations by each artists
- An in-depth interview with the artist about their practice, published on Sonic Acts’ [website](https://sonicacts.com/archive/filter/longreads) and in [_Ecoes_ magazine](https://sonicacts.com/archive/ecoes)

# Eligibility
- Underexposed is intended for young artists of any nationality, 22 to 32 years of age, resident in the Netherlands
- The programme is open to makers, artists, and designers working with experimental sound or moving image, and with a strong interest in ecological issues, who have graduated from art academies or similar artistic programmes, or can demonstrate interest in the field with at least one year of experience
- Currently enrolled students are not eligible for the programme, but students graduating in 2024 are welcome to apply
- Both individual artists and collectives can apply

# Requirements
- Application texts should be in English and must include the following:
- Project plan or grant proposal that you would like to improve (max. 1500 words), including a project budget for max. 40 000 EUR
- A motivation letter (max. 1000 words) in which you provide the following information: a short summary of the project including the current stage of development; outline your expectations of the Underexposed programme; the main challenges you face, and what you need most help with
- Portfolio, including a short bio (bio max. 300 words, max. 10 MB)

# How to Apply
Applications should be submitted on [Homerun](https://sonicacts.homerun.co/underexposed/en) before 7 October 2024.

The selection committee, comprising the Sonic Acts curatorial team, will notify successful applicants by 21 October.

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Open Call: Underexposed Mentorship Programme

Frank J. Oteri

Maryanne Amacher

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The Poetics of Space

Maryanne Amacher's 'Mini Sound Series'

Maud Seuntjens 

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Eléonore Huisse

Kassel Jaeger

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Sally-Jane Norman

Tarek Atoui

Instrument Designer, Archive Researcher & Professor 

Kristina Andersen

Michel Waisvisz

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Ecoes #6

**Ghenwa noiré** is a performer and multimedia installation practitioner based in Amsterdam and Beirut. 

Drawing on Lebanon's social structure, she employs her body as a vocal and movement instrument. noiré explores oral history, gossip, and nonverbal cues in her performances, accompanied by music to channel social and domestic structures. Investigating semantic satiation, she delves into how daily expressions expand in function through repetition. In her work, she questions how one could deal with everyday mental struggles and routines, or with the notion of the ‘self’. 

In collaboration with Hackers and Designers collective, Amsterdam, she developed the Hacked Orchestra project, which was featured at Muziekgebouw in collaboration with Sonic Acts and during Society 5.0 Festival at The Social Hub. She has performed at the Van Gogh Museum (2024), Radion (2024), Worm Rotterdam (2024), W139 (in collaboration with Brackish collective) during Sonic Acts Biennial (2024), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2023), Subbacultcha (2024), documenta fifteen (2022), Radio Alhara (2023), Framer Framed (2022), etc. 

[Website ](https://ghenwanoire.com/)

[Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/ghenwa_noire/) 

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**Marshall Trammell** is a self-styled Music Research Strategist based in the US. 


As an experimental/creative music percussionist, composer, sound installation artist,
Trammell performs with In Defense of Memory (IDOM), featuring Laura Ortman & Carlos Santistevan, White People Killed Them (SIGE Records), featuring Raven Chacon & John Dietrich, Rob Magill (Weird Cry Records), MurderMurder, and an array of international improvisers and participants in his community engagement Insurgent Learning Workshop (ILWs) and Black Fighting Formations (BFF) series.

Some of his works include _The Moon Is Down: The Status Quo Is My Enemy_ (performance developed for the Borealis Festival, Bergen, Norway), _Eleven Postures: for Burn the Temples/Break Up Bells_ (performance and film, directed by Matt Volla), and _Performing Political Education: For Friends_ (installation at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum).

[Instagram ](https://www.instagram.com/musicresearchstrategies/)

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Instagram 

Based on photography and its extension in the medium of film, Alina Schmuch (born 1987, Munster) uses artist's books and video installations to investigate the interaction between the visual medium and reality.

Schmuch studied Media Arts at the HfG Karlsruhe and was a fellow of the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Her work has been presented internationally in exhibitions and screenings including: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2023), Urbane Künste Ruhr (2022), Akademie der Künste (Berlin 2022), Bureau Europa (Maastricht 2019), Künstlerhaus Bremen (2018), MAK-Center (Los Angeles 2017), ZKM (Karlsruhe, 2016) and together with Forensic Architecture at the 15th Architecture Biennale in Venice (2016). Among other awards she received the Visual Arts work stipend of the Berlin Senate 2022, the 27th Bremen Award for Video Art in 2021, the MAK Schindler Scholarship Los Angeles 2017. At the moment she is part of the artistic research program Hydromedia and was selected for the Rupert x Sonic Acts ALTERLIFE residency. 


[Website](http://www.alinaschmuch.de/)\
[Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/alina_schmuch/?hl=en)

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Instagram

http://www.alinaschmuch.de/

Alina Schmuch

A documentary filmmaker based in India with an interest in community-based media practices, **Faiza Ahmad Khan** has recently collaborated with a grassroots movement in Himachal Pradesh on a project concerning indigenous people’s rights to their forests.

Other works include _Habitat 2190_ (2019), a film with Dutch artist Hanna Rullmann that documents the construction of a nature reserve at the site of the refugee camp ‘Jungle in Calais’. Ahmad Khan has also partnered with Susan Schuppli on the British Council-commissioned project _Listening to Ice_ (2023), an acoustic exploration of the changing glacial landscape in the Himalayan region of Ladakh.

The visit of Faiza Ahmad Khan in Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 is made possible by the International Visitors Programme of the Nieuwe Instituut with support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.




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Faiza Ahmad Khan

Films

Moving Ice

An artist based in Bergen, Norway, **Åse Løvgren**’s practice investigates how global entanglements leave material, historical, and political traces locally. 

Using her immediate surroundings on the West Coast of Norway as a prism, she considers connections to globally dispersed production and economies – structures that perpetuate the destruction of nature as well as social and economic inequality.

With artist and curator Karolin Tampere, she was the recipient of ISCP in New York, undertook the iaspis residency in Sweden, and embarked on projects with le Pavilion/Palais de Tokyo. Together with artist Stine Gonsholt, she has participated in exhibitions at the Norwegian National Museum, the annual Autumn exhibition, and the Fotogalleriet in Oslo. She was the co-artistic research leader on the artistic research project the Vision Machine at the University of Bergen, and was a curator at the live event space Landmark at Bergen Kunsthall. Currently, she holds a position at BEK (Bergen center for Electronic Arts) as a project developer.

[Website](https://bek.no/en/ansatt/ase-lovgren-2/)

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Åse Løvgren

Percussionist, composer, and multimedia performer, **Kees van Zelst** has been an emeritus sound engineer for Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, STEIM, in Amsterdam since 1975. 

In the late 1970s, Kees developed the light-controlled performance system Ogenblik, one of the first interactive sensor systems that reads the visual input of dancers with light sensors for sound control. He has worked on countless theatre and dance productions as a composer, producer, and sound/light engineer since 1980 and is still active in the field.