Image: performing Alison Knowles' Nivea Cream score in COVID-19, alone and with alcagel
Salomé Voegelin
Salomé Voegelin is a researcher, artist and writer, 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 post-anthropocentric 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 arts, design and humanities skills and methodologies can generate contemporary questions and understandings of pressing planetary, social as well as political emergencies.
She writes articles and papers, books, texts and text-scores for performance and publication. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), Sonic Possible Worlds (2014/21), The Political Possibility of Sound (2018), Uncurating Sound (2023) and Unperforming the Dream House (2023). These books, as well as her articles and papers, applied working, research and experimentation, develop a critical understanding of music, art and design, and put this artistic and aesthetic knowledge to use in developing new and relevant knowledge methods and methodologies.
She understands artistic working as contributing to current 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 well-respected scholar who is regularly invited to give keynote addresses and talks: e.g. at Sonic Turn, theAttic, Bucharest, 2025, for Sound Driven Design, IRCAM, Paris, 2025, as part of Le Partage des Écoutes, pris de son, prise de position, Université de Montréal, 2023 and at Sonic Architectures, HKB Bern 2023.
As a researcher she focuses on the possibilities of art for knowledge and pedagogy and outreach. She is invested in its scope to re-vision the world from the aesthetic and its material practice. She works collaboratively and across disciplines on projects that explore digital and analogue environments to make us hear the construction of their ecological, political and social design: e.g. Artistic Research at Tyson with Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Anya Yermakova, Washington University, St Louis, 2024, Sonic Topologies ETH Zürich, Switzerland with Magda Drozd 2022, at Translating Ambience with Lisa Hall, Melbourne, Australia 2019.
Voegelin's curatorial performances perform the correspondence of art and its reflection. And her curatorial practice bring sound and artistic thinking to a collective and practice-based engagement. Most recently her tape and text scores framed the curation of two compilation albums: ‘cassette album’ and ‘paint your lips while singing your favourite pop song’, launched 2025 and 2022 respectively, with Flaming Pines and an exciting array of international musicians (e.g. Siavash Amini, claire rousay, Rie Nakajima, Arturas Bumšteinas, KMRU, Hannah Silva, Mariam Rezaei, Samson Young, Cody Yantis).
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 artistic 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.
Image: performing Alison Knowles' Nivea Cream score in COVID-19, alone and with alcagel
Writing
She is the author of 4 influential books. Her publications articulate at the intersection between sound, politics, aesthetics, social responsibility and identity, and develop a critical listening to art, music and the everyday acoustic environment via phenomenology and possible world theory.
Salomé Voegelin writes and talks about sound, music and listening, about the world sound makes: its aesthetic, social and political realities that are hidden by the persuasiveness of a visual point of view.
She has published numerous articles, papers, chapters and essays that explore and expand the field of political and aesthetic thinking via a sonic sensibility. She is regularly invited to give talks, performance lectures and presentations that produce a live investigation of her ideas and pursue a novel take on current aesthetic and socio-political tendencies and imaginaries.
The themes and research of her texts and talks are focused on the marginal, the invisible and at times even the inaudible, to challenge normative thinking and develop new and innovative engagements at its boundaries. To agitate this marginality she also practices a textual phonography and writes text scores, soundwords, which serve as a template for a collaborative writing and a participatory engagement in how we listen and what/ who we hear.
Art
Salomé Voegelin's artistic practice develops as plural threads which share a focus on the collective and the participatory, pursued through performative modes of working. A common interest to all her approaches is the aim to get a different view, to shift and reset registers of the real, to syncopate what we think we see and know.
Since 2008 she works collaboratively David Mollin, Mollin+Voegelin, in a practice that employs words, things and sound and exists as performances, installations, texts and sonic pieces.
She also engages in shorter term collaborative working and performing with different artists, (e.g. Kate Carr, Lisa Hall, Cath Clover, Jan Schacher, Daniela Cascella), and between 2014-2021, she co-convened with Mark Peter Wright, Points of Listening, a series of of workshops for practice and practice-based research, activities and discussions. Since 2022 she organises, Desiging a Sonic Planet, a new participatory events series.
Such a participatory working is also staged through her text score/phonographic writing blog soundwords, which presents the template for collective listening, writing, score and music/sound making. Meanwhile her curatorial performances cross practice, curation and theory, to find in their juxtaposition and simultaneity a critical voice and experience of what we do and think.
Research
Salomé Voegelin works with the relational logic of sound to develop new analytical and theoretical approaches to (artistic) research that promote its legitimacy and enable its contribution to pressing contemporary issues. She is invested in aesthetics as an applied epistemology and employs the inter- and cross-disciplinary nature of listening and sound making to query and expand existing knowledge pathways: to cross-reference different disciplines, e.g. art and design, music, musicology, literary studies, and to develop new methodologies that can challenge and augment traditional (science and social science) knowledge expectations.
Her work is based on the conviction that a focus on the sensorial, the material and felt, on making and experimentation, serve to open academic working to the tacit, the embodied and the local, and thus to novel and plural knowledges that are needed understand and communicate in an asymmetrical and interdependent world.
She is regularly invited to give keynote addresses, and her link between research and practice, curation and education has led to numerous invitations to teach and workshop worldwide.
Salomé Voegelin is an experienced Research Lead having been the PI on several multi-disciplinary and team based, international projects funded by the AHRC, UK: Between 2019-2022 she was the PI on Listening across Disciplines II, which continued the network award of the same name (2016-2017). These two projects sought to establish sound as broadly applicable and legitimate knowledge tool. Most recently the findings of these projects were developed through the Sounding Knowledge Network (2022-2023). Together they inform current research into the possibility of a sonic-science-culture that can listen at the intersection between Climate, Health, Law and Sound.
Her leadership encourages cross-disciplinary thinking and working, between art and industry, art and design, as well as between art and education. She employs the cross-disciplinary capacity of sound to augment and challenge conventional paradigms and disciplinary boundaries in favour of working on shared protocols.
She is a a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, UAL, a founding member of CRiSAP, (centre for Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice), as well as an established PhD supervisor and mentor who is experienced and motivated to support and guide early career researchers across different artistic and theoretical fields.
Thus she promotes thinking from practice to articulate new questions and shape relevant competencies for a contemporary situation: to come to know the ‘unexpected’, that which falls outside an existing understanding but we need to know to deal with what we have no words for yet.
Her research works with music, art and design as well as humanities methods and skills to foster their relationships and communication; to enable collaborations that exploit transdisciplinary opportunities and legitimate artistic knowledge, positioning it as an equal partner to the social as well as the natural sciences.
Press
Click images for links to the articles.
Image: performing Alison Knowles' Nivea Cream score in COVID-19, alone and with alcagel
Image: performing Alison Knowles' Nivea Cream score in COVID-19, alone and with alcagel