Listening to the body - Sonic hymns of resistance and disobedience
Sound Design, Research
Protest-culture, acts of resistance and the experience of togetherness is sonically expressed through social movements, who are including people of diverse backgrounds and even conflicting identities. These protests have their own sonic, musical, and emotional memory’s all around the globe. They do not only reverberate in urban spaces but are spread through technology and media. Bodies play an important role in the terms of collective performative practice as well as the physical listening experience. Sound can be understood here as a phenomenon of transition, that creates reality through different mediums. The practice of listening can be seen as a counter-practice to colonial information production that emphasizes the politics of sound and the power dynamics underneath it, although it is still an ambigousand ambivalent practice.
Out of the chaos of chants, poems, noise, songs and rituals, this work tries to be a subjective collage of global protest and their meanings for another. Found footage from internet archives is used as a source material to emphasize the sonic-spatial aspects of protest. In the end, the composition should be an opportunity to think differently about the sonic powerfulness of protests and encourage to listen in terms of a new sonic ecology. Asking how those protests mobilize humans through performing sound and music with their bodies, which common patterns and links can be found between them and which role do rhythm and velocity play.
