Salomé Voegelin

Professor of Sound

CRiSAP Member (2005 – present)

 

Salomé Voegelin is a writer, researcher and practitioner engaged in listening as a socio-political practice. Her work and writing deal with sound, the world sound makes: its aesthetic, social and political realities that are hidden by the persuasiveness of a visual point of view. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), Sonic Possible Worlds (2014/21), and The Political Possibility of Sound (2018) and Uncuraing Sound (2023). All four books, as well as her numerous articles and papers, applied working and experimentation, develop a critical understanding of art and music as aesthetic, ecological and social, as well as economic and political milieus, whose relational reality and artistic fiction is made accessible and thinkable through sound. Applying phenomenology and possible world theory, and working across art theory, musicology and literary studies as well as performance theory, and into practice she develops 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 the PI of the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) funded projects Listening across Disciplines II, which systematically investigates the potential of listening as a legitimate and reliable methodology for research across the arts and humanities, social science and into science, developing a “hybrid” scholarship from sound. The project seeks to establish the research methodologies and vocabularies needed to develop an “entangled arts and humanities” that can deal with the entangled challenges of a contemporary environmental, public health, political and social crises.

She is also the PI of the Sounding Knowledge Network, an international and bi-lingual research network concerned with bringing the ineffable, the tacit, and embodied qualities of sound to teaching and learning, to “re-vision” its approaches. The aim is to design and apply a reflective and inclusive educational and outreach framework that can cross borders (gender, race, class cultural), and make the knowledges and insights gained from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural arts and humanities scholarship publicly accessible, applied and sustainable.

Voegelin’s practice brings her analytical and theoretical ideas to applied and participatory experimentation. Between 2014-2022 she co-convened PoL, Points of Listening, with Mark Peter Wright. 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 bring together different expertise and knowledge of how we could re-design the world.

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