How to Live Together in Sound? Towards Sonic Democracy

Introduction

How does an environment sound that is ecologically sustainable and socially integrative, fair, and peaceful? Who has the right to decide about the production, organisation, and distribution of sound? This project aims at expanding and enhancing sonic awareness as a basis for empowering sonic citizens to be able to respond these questions.

We all are producing sound, communicating through sound, and surrounded by sound. This project intends to define our sonic environments as sonic commons. Sonic commons are outlined here as networks and agencies for sound perception, generation, and dissemination in which we all—humans and non-humans—should be able to live together in self-determined and sustainable ways.

To achieve these goals, this project pursues a bottom-up and participatory form of art-based research. Stakeholders from the civil society will collaborate with the project team to become co-researchers. Their work will be complemented by guest researchers from different disciplines in the social sciences, arts and humanities. This new model of integrative arts-based research will re-evaluate the boundaries within academia and between academia and the civil society. This intertwinement of art, research, and societal stakeholders aims at transforming the object of research (our co-existence in sound) and the participant researchers (the sonic citizens) towards the realisation of a sonic democracy.