Vibrational Listening and Material Resonance: The Threshold of Co-Creation in Sonic Practice

Gormley, Gerard (2026) Vibrational Listening and Material Resonance: The Threshold of Co-Creation in Sonic Practice. In: Method Art, 30th - 31st March, 2026, Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA.

Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)

Abstract

This presentation introduces vibrational listening as a practical research methodology for artistic research that asks when sound-making becomes genuinely co-creative with other-than-human agency. Working with vibrational speakers/transducers, contact microphones, and resonant surfaces, I treat vibration as raw energetic potential and examine what it becomes when it encounters specific material ecologies: wood, metal, stone, architecture, and everyday objects. Drawing on recent projects, Concrete Dreams of Sound, Geotones, and the soundtrack to Nathalie Harb’s Silent Room V.04 installation, I show how sonic outcomes emerge through negotiation rather than control. Surfaces do not simply ‘carry’ sound: they respond, resist, filter, and transform it. This material behaviour shapes the work’s form in ways that cannot be fully predicted in advance, redistributing agency across human intention, resonant matter, and technological mediation. A key part of the method is recording these interactions through contact microphones, then processing and improvising with the captured vibrations using modular synthesis and effects pedals. This extends co-creation across a chain of actors—materials, microphones, amplification, signal-processing, and listening—where decisions are continually adjusted in response to what the system produces. The ‘threshold’ of co-creation becomes audible when the material response actively steers compositional choices: when the work’s direction is set as much by resonance, feedback, and constraint as by the artist’s prior plan. This frames vibrational listening as an iterative loop of placing, activating, recording, processing, and listening, where co-creation emerges when resonant materials become decisive partners in that loop. Working this way also means treating site and material as more than resources, staying attentive to context and consequences as part of the compositional method.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Lecture)
Divisions:	College of Creative Arts, Technology and Engineering > Performing Arts
Depositing User:	Research and Knowledge Exchange Office Admin 1
Date Deposited:	16 Jul 2026 09:51
Last Modified:	16 Jul 2026 09:51
URI:	https://bnu.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/21120

Actions (login required)

Edit Item