Sonics – serie

On the emergence, embodiment, and mediation of voice as skin. How do we build or make a voice together? Can we imagine the voices we make in the form of a skin, a multi-sensory interface that behaves both as a boundary and as a point of connection? What does such a voice capacitate in times of crises and uncertainties?In Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin, Zeynep Bulut explores these questions. She examines the multi-sensory and collective forms of voice making in experimental music, sound and media art in conversation with the use of voice in creative interventions for environmental crisis, experiences of voice hearing, and digital technologies of artificial and tactile speech. Through this conversation, she points to two key terms: plasticity of voice, and non-dialogue. Plasticity of voice indicates both malleable and resistant aspects of voice. Non-dialogue refers to cross-sensory, non-dyadic, and distributed modes of interaction across both humans and nonhumans. The plasticity of voice and the non-dialogue, Bulut argues, encourage us to think about voice in the form of a skin, a surface that both connects and differentiates, without being limited to human body or labels of verbal language. Voice-as-skin, in effect, prompts us to reflect on both individual and collective, concrete and emergent, and uncertain and shared aspects of voice and speech, as well as to pace and revisit our conceptions of communication, intersubjectivity, connectivity, understanding and empathy.

The STEIM foundation in Amsterdam was a music studio radically dedicated to the live, physical performance of electronic sound. From 1969 to 2021, the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music supported artists in building new instruments, insisting on tangible, hands-on engagements with electronic sound.This book provides a comprehensive overview of STEIM's work, drawing on original interviews and extensive primary source research in the archive of its longtime artistic director, Michel Waisvisz (1949-2008). It traces the studio's evolution from its roots in the anarchic, situationist spirit of 1960s Amsterdam to the famous Cracklebox and to a long line of pioneering developments in sensor-based instruments between 1984 and 2000.A primary focus is Waisvisz's landmark instrument The Hands (1984)-the world's first sensor-based gestural controller-and the SensorLab platform it inspired. This emerging expertise fueled an international artist-in-residence programme, attracting figures like Jon Rose, Nicolas Collins, or Laetitia Sonami among many others and fostering a global wave of experimental instrument design.The common thread through this history is a paradigm called Touch, which championed musicians' embodied presence over automation and predefined control. By documenting the pursuits of immediacy within highly mediated technologies, The STEIM Touch offers a crucial historical lens for today's ongoing negotiations between artificiality and physicality in music creation.