Sonic Migrations

Date: 29th of October

When: 16.30-18.00

Where: Botanic Gardens (we will meet at the entrance)

Who: Bureau for Listening and Ximena Alarcón-Díaz

Practicalities: Bring a filled water bottle for hydration / dressed for the weather

 

Link: Sign-up

 

Note: This session happens in conjugation with both lecture and  2-day Workshop by Ximena Alarcon Diaz at IAC, Malmö in week 44. See more at IAC

Sonic Migrations
Workshop Introduction

How do we listen across distances — between places, bodies, memories, and more-than-human beings? In this session, artist Ximena Alarcón-Díaz invites participants into a trilogy of listening rituals exploring sonic migrations: the resonances that emerge when we tune in to what travels between us and beyond us. 

Through a series of gentle, embodied practices, we will connect our waking selves to the dream world, to childhood memories of nature, and to the voices of trees and lands around us. Moving between inner and outer landscapes, the session offers a space to sense and sound together, weaving personal and collective experiences of belonging and displacement.

The rituals — Grounding from the Sea of Dreams, Wording Land, and Treeling — invite us to experiment with sound, silence, and resonance. No musical or performance training is needed; only a willingness to listen deeply, respond intuitively, and join others in co-creating a temporary, sonic commons.

Practicalities:
Bring a filled water bottle, dress for the weather, and come with curiosity. The session is open to all, and no prior experience is required.

Ximena Alarcón-Díaz is a sound and listening artist-researcher exploring embodied interfaces for sensing place and telepresence to listen to and sound collectively our sonic migrations. She composes immersive listening collective experiences and creates Interfaces for Relational Listening, for the emergence of aural territories of memory and emotion. She has a PhD in Music Technology and Innovation (DMU), and became a Deep Listening® certified tutor, mentored by Pauline Oliveros.  Through postdoctoral awards she created Sounding Underground (Leverhulme Trust 2007-2009); the telematic improvisations Networked Migrations (CRiSAP, 2011-2017); and the embodied telematic system INTIMAL (Marie Skłodowska Curie IF 2017-2019). Awardee of art funds she has created: INTIMAL App© (The Studio Recovery Fund 2021), the surround sound installation UNRAVELLING/DESENREDANDO (Immersive Audio Network 2023; Four Nations International Fund, 2024), and the installation Huellas de Aire (MAMM, 2024). She teaches at the Center for Deep Listening (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), and works as a Coordinator of Postgraduate Arts Degrees at the Universidad de Antioquia.

Sonic Migration ritual by Ximena Alarcón-Díaz for the session:

Grounding from the sea of dreams

 

Note: This score invites you to have a gentle transition, listening between your dream, sleeping time, and your waking reality.  

 

[sound: bubbling, babbling]

 

Wake up listening within your body

As a sea creature

 

Move your body gently in waves

As if you were swimming in a sea of dreams 

 

Propelling new waves that are transmitted

Throughout your whole body

 

Breathe in through your blowholes 

Gently exhale connecting yourself to your dream journeys

 

Continue the breathing cycle and listen to 

the spontaneous sounds that emerge from your cetacean voice

Freely follow the transitionary movements to your waking reality

 

Let your sounds unite in one humming song

 

When your song comes to an end

Listen to the sounds that your wave 

has awakened in your surroundings

 

Ground yourself

 

Wording Land

 

Note: For groups of two or three people (in any spoken language).

Speakers don’t need to understand each others’ native language. 

 

Each person 

Recall three words

That you cherish from your relationship to nature as a child

Use your native language

 

In your mind’s ear compose a sequence using the words

 

Explore their sonic fragments

Listen to the silences in-between each word

Allow your body to sense the memory carried by each word

 

Signal with a smile to others when you are ready

 

Together simultaneously

 

Make your sequences audible

For each other 

 

Freely sound phonemes, syllables, consonants, and vowels of each word

[sounds: the musicality of the words mixed together]

 

Let your heart bridge your words to the land

Sense your body and free subtle movements that emerge

 

Listen in between your words, to others

And your synchronous overlappings

 

When you have heard everyone’s words

Voice another person’s word, 

Inviting that person to tell the story behind that word

 

That person becomes the voicer

and will tell the story in any sonic style

 

The others will become resonators 

Whispering abstract sounds that resonate 

With the voicer’s story 

All sense the connection to the voicer’s land

When the voicer naturally ends the story, the original word has landed 

 

The voicer removes the chosen word from her wording sequence

 

Voicer and resonators go back to voice their sequence

Until there is a new invitation

 

The score ends when all the words have arrived at the shared land

Treeling

 

Note: A group of people across distant locations, agree to connect with and through tree stories, at a specific time and day following this score, and then meet virtually to sing the experience in a network with others.

 

[sounds: Native American flute whistles, breathing out particles of soil sand floating across distances]

 

[sounds: percussive sounds made with Australian aboriginal clapping sticks]

 

In the place where you live

Greet a listening tree

 

walk with slow steps 

surrounding it and making one circle 

in silence, listening around the tree

 

[sounds: vibration made by rubbing a circular figure on an Irish bodhrán drum]

 

[sounds: decisive tap and further circular rubbing on an Irish bodhrán drum]

 

Continue making a second circle

Tell the tree mentally a story of a tree you remember

From your native land

 

[sounds: decisive tap and accumulated vibration of the circular rubbing of an Irish bodhrán drum]

 

Continue making a third circle

Listen to a story that the tree needs to tell you 

About this land

 

When completing the circle

In stillness, sense your feet

Listen to the vibrations between your feet, the soil

and the roots of the tree

 

Sing a two-word treelingual song in a loop

One word from your story

One word from the story the tree has shared with you

(Note: The tree might communicate in sound that is not yet a word)

 

Change the speed of each word until you feel a rhythm that suits your breathing,

And listen for a new word emerging in-between

 

When the song ends,

go and gently touch  

with your palms

the bark of your treeling friend.

 

Feel the connection in time and space

Through the network of trees

 

Root the experience in your cells.

 

Gathering in a Virtual Platform

 

Shared song

 

The group connects

On a virtual platform.

 

In order of each one’s arrival

Using the chat window

Everyone adds their name and their song to the list.

 

When everyone has arrived

 

Agree on:

A shared hand gesture that suggests interconnection

A hand gesture that gives way to the next song

 

Start the Song

 

Invite each other to breathe together

With your hands and body relaxed

 

Touch the ground

with the soles of your feet

 

Bring from all your cells the memory of the song.

 

In the established order

The first person sings her song

sounding its rhythmic flavor

 

the others, listen

 

She signals interconnection

All come together repeating her song

keeping her pace of time

 

Listen across the distance

Delays and synchronicities

of this ancestral network

 

She  finishes singing her song

By giving the signal to move on to the next person.

 

The next person

Starts to sing their own song 

In its unique rhythm

For others

 

Everyone listens

 

In the same spirit

And at the signal given by them 

join in interconnection

Repeat their song

 

Continue the cycle of singing, connecting, listening and moving

From one person to the other 

 

Until the last person’s song has been heard.

 

Silently listen within your bodies

to the immemorial space that has been created

 

from distant places

in-between your cells

in present tense.

 

Farewell

To say goodbye, each person offers a free gesture of gratitude

received by all

 

And disconnects from the video call

 

Alone

 

Without technology

feel the supportive connections

that unite the wisdom of people and trees.