Sound Studies and Sonic Arts - UdK Berlin

Selim El Sadek | Until The River Awakens | 28-31.05 Sounds Master Exhibit Collegium Hungaricum

Until the River Awakens

Until the River Awakens is a video installation. The work moves between insect, body, and land; between the swarm that passed and the witness that remained.

The piece circles a question its own footage cannot answer: what surfaces when an archive has been deliberately unmade, when sedated memories return without warning .As apparitions, as soil that refuses to forget, as a tongue trained not to speak. And as lingering memories that resist the sovereign logic that what is buried remains buried.

Louis Quek | Frisson | 28-31.05 Sounds Master Exhibition Collegium Hungaricum

Frisson

Frisson centers the phantom emergence between machine listening and human auditory perception, an ambiguous entanglement belonging to neither, summoned through their intra-active agencies. Through mnemonic perception, auditory hallucination, and algorithmic improvisation, the work cycles through initiation, recognition, reproduction, and stabilization: a continuous arc in which sound and data form feedback loops, each completing the other and generating new cycles of re-emergence. The listener is never passive, their accumulated sonic memory, becomes compositional material that the system reads, responds to, and completes. Frisson is not a mere response to interaction, but the body’s anticipation meeting the unexpected, shifting the compositional act from making sound to making the conditions in which sound makes itself.

Oda Starheim | Porous | 28.05 SoundS Master Exhibition Collegium Hungaricum

Porous

Singing at the edge of the voice, in and out of bodies, in and out of cavities. Through extended vocal techniques and live processing of voice, the performance listens to voice; its fragilities and boundaries. A voice that never settles but multiplies, dissolves, mutates, alienates, distorts. Voicing emerges not just as physical sensations in the throat, but as expanded forms of expression; as movement and non-movement, as chaos and silence. Exploring the body as a fleshy interface, it follows a voice that is leaky and shared.

Time: 8:30 - 9:00 pm

Panoptico Produktion | Requiem For A Robot | 28-31.05 SoundS Master Exhibition Collegium Hungaricum

Requiem For A Robot

Agbogbloshie
3,6175 Rezensionen, Accra Ghana, Open 24 hours. This is where electronic waste ends up. The work reflects on the human tendency to create electronic waste and garbage without considering their lasting consequences. The materials embody a kind of permanence that disrupts natural cycles rather than integrating into them. In doing so, the piece explores the tension between transience and persistence, questioning our responsibility toward the things we bring into existence.This is for all my low-performance robots. With love. Let`s pay one`s last respects!

Everything that does not come to the surface of our consciousness returns as fate (Christian Kracht) This work stages a funeral for a robot assembled from electronic scrap, treating technological waste as both body and relic. A requiem accompanies the ritual, composed through a hybrid ensemble of computer-generated instruments, a Roland JP-8000 synthesizer, and an AI-generated choir.

Sounding Photographs installed on the wall are arranged in a configuration reminiscent of the Holy Trinity, introducing a symbolic structure that frames the ritual.The work meditates on cycles of construction, decay, and obsolescence, drawing parallels between technological and natural processes. In staging a ceremonial farewell for a machine assembled from discarded materials, it highlights the fragility of systems—organic and synthetic alike—and questions the boundaries between creation, decay, and renewal.

MAF | Susurrus | 28-31.05 SoundS Master Exhibition Collegium Hungaricum

Susurrus

Susurrus is a sculptural sound installation that explores vibration as both a physical force and a mode of communication. The work centers on a low-frequency coded message embedded into a resonant structure of steel, brass, and wood. Drawing on African and diasporic traditions, Susurrus treats vibration as an ancestral technology wherein communication unfolds through sensation and duration, engaging the body before cognition. Susurrus invites sustained attention and proximity; meaning emerges through presence, framing listening as an embodied, ethical act, asking what it means to remain in resonance with a message that persists across history. Through vibration and material resonance, the installation creates a shared field where sound, memory, and collective responsibility intersect, reflecting a timeless urgency.

Kurt Reinartz | Three Rhythm For Stained Glass | 28-31.05 SoundS Masters Exhibition Collegium Hungericum

Three Rhythm For Stained Glass

An encounter between the incalculable steadiness of daylight and photoresistors produce a rhythm that animates a stained glass window. The window echoes those found in Christian churches and cathedrals, where theological myths once supplied the moral scaffolding through which the West shaped its core assumptions about reality, knowledge, time and society. As data-points within discrete systems have replaced God as the extrahuman authority, a necessary friction emerges between an eschatological rationality and the irreducibility of phenomenological duration. This is a recalcitrant rhythm persisting stubbornly against redefinition and computation.

g.e.n.e. | Mother’s Voices | 28.05 - 31.05 SoundS Masters Exhibition Collegium Hungericum

Mother’s Voices

A mother, as cultural construct, is not reducible to the biological function of bearing and nursing children. She is instead a dense node of social inscription—a figure produced through interlocking systems of discourse, law, economy, and symbolic order. Long before biological motherhood, womanhood is already being scripted; the maternal voice carries traces of that scripting, of what accepts and refuses it, but, more importantly, of what the script never reached.

The installation opens a space between the maternal voice still bearing those traces and the child as undifferentiated life force not yet captured by them. Here, we navigate between conditioning and the awareness that perceives conditioning as such. It is a way of listening to the mystery that the cultural mother simultaneously transmits and occludes.

Hisako Nakaoka | Flow from above | 30.05 SoundS Masters Exhibition Collegium Hungericum

Flow from above

Choreographed listening with a solo performer, a directional speaker, and a monitor speaker.

One day, the woman downstairs woke to the sound of falling water. It continued to fall, at times intensifying, at times softening.

This is a water song for things that remain unchanged yet appear altered, and things that seem to change while staying the same. Silence, memory, and thirst touch an endlessly falling stream.

Time: 30.5 at 8:30-9:00 pm

Exhibition and performances by students opening this Friday at

house is a body, body is a home

An exhibition by Helen Hines with Natascha Schoenaich.

Opening night featuring live performances by Maria Ferrer, Damian Noguera and Vicente Yáñez

house is a body, body is a home is a transdisciplinary exhibition of sculpture, film, performance, sound, and a publication that situates itself inside processes of decay. Emerging from encounters with abandoned houses in rural Japan, the works gather ash, clay, discarded objects, and the human body into quiet constellations that hospice erosion. Here, decomposition and weathering are co-authors. Matter listens, remembers, and transforms.

Exhibition runs from May 22 - May 31, 2026
Open daily 14:00 - 20:00

Opening Vernissage:
Friday, May 22, 18:00-22:00
with live performances at 19:00

Artist talk:
Wednesday, May 27, 19:00
with Michele Reilly & Brandon Labelle

Closing Finissage:
Sunday, May 31, 14:00-18:00
with a live performance at 16:00

Yesterday the university senate voted to close Sound Studies and Sonic Arts in its current form. After the vote a motion was passed to try to continue Sound Studies within the structure of UdK’s main faculties. We hope that this can be achieved.

Thank you to everyone that has shown your support for the department in the past weeks. We will keep you updated with the future of SoundS.