Salomé Voegelin

Salomé Voegelin is a writer, researcher, and practitioner, who works from the relational logic of sound to focus on the in-between and the liminal, where different disciplines meet to deal with contemporary issues, and where feminist, decolonial, and postanthropocentric demands can engender different and plural knowledge possibilities. She is engaged in the transversal and transdisciplinary potential of the sonic - to listen across disciplines and processes in order to develop a hybridisation of research where music, arts and humanities skills and methodologies can generate a contemporary response to climate, health and social emergencies.

She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), Sonic Possible Worlds (2014/2021), The Political Possibility of Sound (2018) and Uncurating Sound (2023). These books, as well as her numerous articles and papers, applied working and experimentation, develop a critical understanding of music, art and the environment as aesthetic, ecological and social, as well as economic and political milieus, whose relational reality and artistic fiction is made accessible through a “sonic thinking”, understood not as essentialist or an anti-visual mode of engagement, but as multi-sensory and response-able: making us “see” more, and appreciative also of what we might not see.

She is a scholar who is regularly invited to give keynote addresses and talks: e.g. at WHAT SOUNDS DO, UCPH Copenhagen, 2022, for I am not sitting in a room - urban, political and social resonances, Bauhaus University, 2022, as part of RE: Sound, Aalborg, 2019 and at UNAM, Mexico City, 2018.

As an artistic-researcher she focuses on the possibilities of sound and music for knowledge and pedagogy, and is invested in its scope to re-vision the aesthetic to reveal hidden slices of the real. She works collaboratively and across disciplines on projects that explore digital and analog environments to make us hear the construction of their ecological, political and social design: e.g. Sonic Topologies ETH Zürich, Switzerland with Magda Drozd 2022, at Translating Ambience with Lisa Hall, Melbourne, Australia 2019, with David Mollin as part of The Manifesto of Rural Futurism, Palermo 2018 and Melbourne 2019.

Her work between research and practice, curation and education, has led to invitations to teach and conduct workshops worldwide: e.g. Casino Luxembourg 2022, Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen 2021, Harvard University, Boston 2020, Doctoral School Ghent University 2019.

Voegelin's participatory initiatives and curatorial performances bring music and sound making to a collective and practice-based engagement. Her blog soundwords is the template for a public listening, performing and writing. Most recently it framed the curation of a compilation album, ‘paint your lips while singing your favourite pop song’, launched 2022, with Flaming Pines and an exciting array of international musicians (Siavash Amini, claire rousay, Rie Nakajima, AGF, Arturas Bumšteinas, Rebecca Lennon, Rhodri Davies and KMRU).

Between 2014-2022 she co-convened PoL, Points of Listening, with Mark Peter Wright. A monthly series of events which engaged communal listening and sound making in relation to current issues such as Hearing Diversity, Sonic Pedagogy, Care, Ecology, Gender and Technology. It is currently being regenerated, Post-COVID, and in the face of escalating political, social and climate crises, as a collective and applied design project: Designing a Sonic Planet, taking the invisible and relational as a starting point to employ musical and sonic competencies and knowledge to re-imagine the world.

Voegelin is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, UK. (2024)

Interviews

• Ear Room interview

Links

• Website
• Performance Lecture: Daniela Cascella, David Toop and Salomé Voegelin practice the art of listening, video, 56 min, 2012.