Sonic Calls, Evolving Stars

Stellar Per-formations at the Edge of the Collapse (Hoyos Gómez 2024) is a project in which my multiple vocational interests come together, contributing to shape my creative practice involving voice, body movement, electronic music and media art. I vividly remember enjoying recitation as a child. In Bogotá, Colombia, my hometown, I met with friends after school many times to dress up and create stagings of short poems that we had been introduced to in language classes. I particularly remember two: Elefantotelefonía (lit. Elephantotelephony) by Clara Ruiz, and El sol quería bañarse (lit. The Sun Wanted to Bathe) by Salvador de Madariaga. I still like how sound flows in those poems. While it would perhaps be futile to express in adult words what I most enjoyed about the imaginative scenes these po-ems depict, back then, I probably enjoyed personifications or the blending in the made-up word elephantotelephony. I also vividly remember reciting a passage from an article on the 1985 Mexico City earthquake for my classmates. The article was written in French, a second language I learnt when I was four years old, living with my family in a suburb of Paris. The passage I recited mentioned the date of the earthquake, its duration, and the number of deaths it caused. Remem-bering this makes me think that I was exposed from an early age to a broad range of content and multilinguistic resources to create, later in life, sound-poetry — an experimental art genre born at the beginning of the twentieth century, blend-ing literature, music, sound, body movement and visual arts— that now forms the core of my art practice.

As part of the Research Culture Week 2022 at the University of Huddersfield, UK, where I developed my doctoral project, I invited the London-based sound poet Hannah Silva to perform and introduce important concepts underpinning her creative practice. In her presentation, she referred to a childhood memory, recalling that she spent many spare hours practising an acrobatic movement with her tongue that she now uses in her sound poetry performances. In an informal conversation afterwards, she asked me why I chose to work with sound poetry and astronomy — in particular, with stellar evolution — in my doctoral research project. I told her that, curiously, since I was a child, when I close my eyes to rest, often after a little while I see stars like small white dots against a black background moving towards me. The moving image resembles one of the old Windows 95 screensavers. This recurrent image could be explained through the psycho-physics of visual perception, but I have nevertheless always felt the dots were like stars.

From Dust to Dust: Tracing Stellar Evolution’s Inspirational Resonances

We Are Made of Star Stuff

In 2008, scientists Jennifer Johnson and Inese Evans, investigating stellar evolution and the origin of elements, outlined the periodic table shown in Figure 1, based on data collected by different observatories:

This periodic table can be linked to astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan’s evocative statement: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interior of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff” (Sagan 1995). Johnson and Evans clarify that while the collapse of massive, medium- and low-mass stars is one of the sources of elements found in our Solar System, other sources can be identified. Fusions of particles at the start of the universe produced hydrogen and helium. Elements in purple stem from the merging of neutron stars (Johnson 2017). Figure 2 shows the main stages in stellar evolution for stars of different masses.

To the left, in Figure 2, star formation clouds are depicted. Star formation is a process that takes place when certain dense regions of molecular clouds scattered in interstellar space collapse. Dying stars, while exploding, chemically enrich these clouds, where new stars are born (NASA 2024). This process constitutes the stellar life cycle.

Sonification of Stellar Phenomena

The sonification of stellar phenomena can be considered a fruitful process to create sound poetry compositions related to stellar evolution. Sonification uses non-speech sounds to convey information (Hermann, Hunt, and Neuhoff 2011). It comprises two different tecniques: parameter mapping and audification. Parameter mapping involves the association of information with auditory parameters such as the pitch, timbre, duration, volume, or location of sound sources. The colour, size or mass of stars can, for instance, be mapped onto specific sounds. Audification translates sequences of data underpinning inaudible waveforms into audible sounds. It can be applied to recordings that need to be shifted in pitch to be perceived by humans, and to acoustic data from mechanical waves, such as seismic waves or plasma waves in stars.

The sonification of stellar phenomena may be used in scientific research and in artworks linked to science, as illustrated by the following examples: The talk The Sound the Universe Makes by science communicator Janna Levin presents the idea that sonifications of cosmic phenomena can create a cosmic soundtrack (Levin 2011), that would allow us to perceive, for instance, the song of gravitational waves released by black holes colliding; or the music of cosmic background radiation emitted at the origin of the universe. The website Audiouniverse, created by a team of researchers working in the UK, Italy and Spain, develops sonification applications in education, and includes researchers dedicated to making astronomy accessible to the visually impaired (Harrison and Trayford 2024).

As an example of the use of sonification in sound art, Figure 3 shows the vinyl piece Sons do Sol (2019) by artist Inês Rebelo (Rebelo 2019).

I had the opportunity to present this piece as part of the exhibition Auris mundos (2020) that I co-curated in Bogotá. Rebelo describes the piece as “an incursion through our closest star, capturing its unheard voice through NASA’s recordings in a vinyl disc to bring the full affectation of its audio signal. Paradoxically heartbeat sound-like, these otherworldly tunes become vital reminders of the urgency of climate change”. We do not yet have the technology to place microphones inside the Sun. Nevertheless, it is possible at present to make sonifications of the Sun’s outermost vibrations filmed by special cameras on the probes that have approached our closest star (Evans 2018).

Another example illustrating the use of sonification in science and in the arts that is worth mentioning is the piece Le noir de l’étoile (The Black of a Star) (1991–2023) for six percussionists, tape and live electronics by Gérard Grisey (2004). The composition is inspired by pulsars, which are types of neutron stars emitting directional electromagnetic beams from their poles. The rotation of the star causes the pulsed appearance of the beam when detected from our planet, resembling the beams of lighthouses (Burnell 2007). A recording of a sonification of different pulsars’ beats was presented to Grisey by his friend, the astronomer Joseph Silk. Grisey used this recording as a basis for his composition. In the piece, six percussionists surround the audience. The composition starts with a text written and performed by astronomer Jean Pierre Luminet discussing pulsars and the circumstances of their discovery in the late 1960s. The latest versions of the piece performed after 2010 include new sonifications of pulsars, and an expanded text by Luminet on the nature of pulsars as residual bodies of supernova explosions. A supernova is shown in Figure 2, to the left of a neutron star. Luminet comments that the persisting beats of the pulsars are as soft as murmurs, in comparison to the loud explosion of the supernova preceding the formation of the pulsar (Luminet 2011).

The compendium Music Inspired by Astronomy Catalog (Fraknoi 2018), lists more than two hundred and fifty classical, popular and contemporary pieces of music. The author of this compendium, Andrew Fraknoi, is a retired professor of astronomy and honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada and is dedicated to astronomy education in universities and to making it accessible to the public. Music Inspired by Astronomy Catalog is currently the only online catalogue within the music/astronomy dyad. The pieces listed in this compendium are inspired by astronomy, whether in terms of their form and structure, lyrics referring to cosmic phenomena or space exploration, or their use of sonified radio astronomy signals (Mohon 2021). However, the list lacks a category dedicated to sound poetry and astronomy. Similarly, a recent book titled Music and Astronomy: From Pythagoras to Steven Spielberg, covering a wide range of musical genres in relation to astronomy, makes no mention of sound poetry and astronomy (Agro 2023).

I consider relevant, in relation to my project, the sound poetry works Cosmic Poem (2014), Pluto is a Planet! (2018) and In Be Twin (2019), made by the Berlin-based Japanese sound poet and composer Tomomi Adachi, in collaboration with Akihiro Kubota, Hannah Silva, and Violaine Lochu, respectively. In Be Twin is a sound-poetry duet performance in which Adachi and Lochu develop an invented language by improvising and experimenting with concepts related to the link between linguistics and the notion of family resemblance proposed by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lochu 2020). Cosmic Poem consists of a sound poem performed with a voice synthesiser and transmitted by the CubeSat satellite Artsat1: Invader (Adachi and Kubota 2014). It was aired on radio for two weeks in the summer of 2014, reaching several cities on Earth. The comic sound piece Pluto is a Planet! was performed in a basement in York, among other alternative venues. The piece stages a dialogue between two fictional outer-space characters communicating, fighting, and teasing each other. The performers of this duet use red t-shirts with infrared sensors that process their voices by mapping their body movements. The texts used in the piece were based on data and controversies around the reclassification of Pluto in 2006, shifting its status from planet to dwarf planet (Silva and Adachi 2018).

Both orality and aurality are at play in sonic poetry performances. Researchers Ana María Ochoa Gauthier and Amanda Minks’ focus on “recent theorization of aurality — the immediate and mediated practices of listening that construct perceptions of nature, bodies, voices, and technologies” (Ochoa Gauthier 2021) has been considered in the development of this project along with other related studies mentioned in the section Immersive Au(o) ralities of this article.

From Hedgehogs’ Constellations to Stellar Soniclutions

My personal creative journey led me to propose a doctoral research project drawing from past pieces I made linked to astronomy: the poetry book Figuras de Erizos (2001) (Hedge-hogs’ Constellations) and the performances of Selenium 06 (2013–2015) presented in Figure 4. Selenium 06 developed into two new stage works: Before the Sun Exhausts Its Core (2015) and Aliento Cuerpo Selenio (2015).

Figuras de Erizos (2001) (Hedgehogs’ Constellations) is a poetry book I wrote in Spanish sketching different characters that have either personality traits or physical features that evoke imaginary constellations of hedgehogs. The fact that hedgehogs are mostly nocturnal animals led me to imagine night-sky projections of the animal as the constellations that are described in the book. The work Selenium 06 (2013–2015) was inspired by the elements of the periodic table, focusing on gold and selenium, which is an element of the periodic table named after Selene, the Greek goddess of the Moon. The performance was imagined as an enactment of a protest linked to the impact of gold mining and put in contrast with the Earth’s natural cycling of selenium. Pilates balls were used to represent both atoms and cosmic bodies in the piece, as shown in Figure 4. For the performance Before the Sun Exhausts its Core, I created a text describing the formation and evolution of the Sun concisely. When creating the text, I used passages in English, Spanish, and French from Wikipedia describing the life-stages of the Sun. I felt that certain words or sentences were more expressive and resonant in one language than in the others. I combined words and sentences in all three languages for the recitation. I enjoy learning facts and understanding more about phenomena I am curious about, while engaging in creative writing for my performances.

These works gradually paved the way to compose the main research question of the project, formulated as follows:

What creative frameworks can be established by integrating sound-poetry as a vibrating field merging music, literature, visual arts and performance, on the one hand, and stellar evolution, on the other, considering the hypothesis that physical, cultural and living processes might mirror each other at different scales?

This is a two-part question. The first part considers the possible creative links between sound-poetry and stellar evolution. Stellar evolution is the process by which stars change over time, disintegrate, and nurture the interstellar medium with the remnants of explosions in their final stages, giving birth to new stars (ESA/HUBBLE 2025). I attempted to explore the analogy between stellar evolution and the creative process in sound-poetry from which, through the linguistic decomposition of words into phonemes or into sonic fragments, new sound-poems can be formed. The second part of the question considers the hypothetical idea underpinning possible analogical mirrorings between art forms and physical phenomena. As this project aimed to demonstrate, the two parts of the question can potentially lead to the development of innovative new frameworks in the arts. I developed my research practice to tackle this challenge.

Use of Blended and Transformed Words

This article employs a small set of neologisms that I have created for different purposes. These purposes are: (i) to describe new concepts I propose by blending or superposing terminology of existing concepts, such as ‘au(o)ralities’; (ii) to form the titles of the pieces in a manner that can convey certain sonic features of the languages I speak, using orthographic and phonetic transformations, such as ‘quantoum’ and ‘étoilium’. In both cases, the proposed new terms are intended to invite the reader to link the sonic malleability of the linguistic elements used in the compositions with the discussion of the ideas that underpin the genesis of these works.

A Note on the Coloured Pages

I have included a text, printed on pages with a light-purple-background, that I wrote presenting the collaborative project St-arts/ Star*ts, that was the niche for the sound-art installation Estela É-toile Confab and the portfolio piece Fusing Étoilium. These coloured pages indicate that the reader can explore these parts separately, representing either another type of writing or another logic-flow.

Stellar Sonic-lutions’ Portfolio

The PhD project’s portfolio, which I have titled Stellar Soniclutions, is composed of four substantial pieces developed in various formats: the audiovisual works Vira realis (Hoyos Gómez and Wojnicka 2021) and Quantoum Lullaby (Hoyos Gómez and Hernández 2024), as well as the audio works Conjunction Podcast (Hoyos Gómez 2021) and Fusing Étoilium (Hoyos Gómez and Hernández 2023). Conjunction Podcast was created for both head-phones and a ring of 8 speakers. Fusing Étoilium is a binaural piece that was conceived from exploring spatialised sound in the group exhibition Starts/ Star*ts (2023) at the Bath House Galleries, in the UK. My master’s studies in media art opened for me an artistic vision in which exploring formats to develop and present my work allowed me to unveil new creative paths and find novel ways of interacting with the audience. I am referring to formats in a sense that covers both types of technologies involved in creating a media artwork, and also the overall setting in which the media artwork is presented. In terms of technologies, I have explored fixed media, editing works that were performed live, which is the case for Quantoum Lullaby in its two versions, and works that were assembled in the music studio, which is the case for Conjunction Podcast and Fusing Étoilium. These two audio works will be presented in this article as representing a group of sister pieces addressing the following sub-question of my research project:

How can I explore the aesthetic potential of both aurality and orality in sound-po-etry works, imagining future scenarios for conscious life’s communication in and across stellar systems?

Imagining Future Interplanetary Communication Through Sound

Sound Poetry “Podcasted” in Outer Space

Sound poetry explores language and sound creatively. Its origins can be traced to the begin-ning of the twentieth century. It is a genre that has been expanding in a chameleon-like and scattered manner, often hybridised with the visual arts. The main distinctive feature of sound poetry is its focus on the sonic quality of language, often emphasised to the point of producing works composed mainly by assemblages of letters and phonemes that do not form existing words. Artist and researcher Dick Higgins’s study of sound poetry (Higgins 1980) resulted in a taxonomy of the genre that was revised in more recent years by Mexican researcher Susana González (González Aktories 2008). She expands the categories for sound poetry proposed by Higgins to five types, reflecting different kinds of creative approaches to the field:

1. 1. Word-play pieces.

2. 2. Works with invented languages.

3. 3. Works emphasising gestures and body language.

4. 4. Compositions integrating noise and soundscapes.

5. 5. Compositions with complementary verbal and musical elements that are not songs.

Certain sound poetry compositions fit more than one of the types listed above. In the works of vocal, visual and performance artist Anna Homler, for instance, invented languages are a main component, while characters that she creates to enact her sound poems, like ‘Breadwoman’, display an emphasis on gestures and body language (Sherburne 2015).

My work Conjunction Podcast, created during the COVID-19 pandemic, investigates affordances of the podcast format for sound composition. Since the year 2000, with the advent of portable audio devices and mobile phones, podcasts, similar to radio pro-grams in form, started to circulate and evolve on the internet, prompting new creative opportunities. I tested this format bearing in mind several works made by sound poets in the twentieth century using radio as a medium. From the compelling history of radio-phonic pieces in the twentieth century, I will briefly introduce two works by Mexican and Swedish artists that I connect to my podcast.

Radio broadcasting as a means of sound transmission was very appealing to sound poets from the 1920s onward (Gallo 2005; González Aktories 2008). In Mexico, the avantgarde stridentist poet Manuel Maples Arce created the poem T.S.H. Telegrafía sin Hilos (1923) (Wireless Telegraphy) as part of the first public radio broadcast in his country (Molina 2012). His recitation was introduced by radio tuning noises. In his poem, the radio antenna was referred to as a star radiating words, mixing different languages spoken worldwide. The audacious metaphor proposed by Maples Arce could have been surprising, disorienting, or inspiring for the listeners tuning in for the first time (Ortuño 2023). As decades passed, experimentation with the technological medium diversified its aesthetic possibilities. Radio programs such as Nattövning (Night Exercises) by Öyvind Fahlström contributed to the vibrant Scandinavian experimental scene of sound poets in the 1960s (Hanson 1993). One of Fahlström’s broadcast compositions, Birds of Sweden (1963), assisted by sound technician Erik Winlöf, featured the two invented lan-guages “Whammo” and “Birdo”, created from onomatopoeias found in American comic books and from transcriptions of bird sounds (Olsson 2016). I also considered, as in the examples above, a multilingual scenario in my attempt to create a podcast imagining future extraterrestrial habitats. Currently, robotic missions to the Moon, Mars and other astronomical bodies of the Solar System are compiling basic information considering prospective habitats on other planets. The following section describes my performative approach in more detail, as well as the opportunities for language and sound play that outer space exploration has opened up.

My Translingual Hostess Persona in the Podcast

In December 2020, during the eighth month of the pandemic, I was temporarily living in the countryside, near Bogotá. I had the opportunity to observe Jupiter and Saturn from that rural area, during the astronomical event called the Great Conjunction, when these two planets appeared the closest they had been together in the sky since 1623 and were at the closest observable distance to Earth since 1226. The piece Conjunction Podcast was developed from that experience. I presented myself as the hostess of a performative program I devised, introducing the fictional podcast’s episode as follows:

Hola and welcome to the Exotronic Fields weekly podcast. My name is Tricia Gómez. Dans l’épisode qui suit, we look at La Gran Conjunción in 2020 of Jupiter and Saturno. Pour la première fois, humanity was able to see La Gran Conjunción of two of les plus grandes planètes de notre système solaire through the tele-scope (Hoyos Gómez 2021).

I chose the name Tricia Gómez for my hostess persona in the program. Through her voice, I aimed at conveying an imagined capacity to fluently alternate words in different languages while speaking. Being a native speaker of Colombian Spanish, who learnt French and English subsequently, I realised over the years that I felt more comfortable pronouncing certain words in one of these three languages. When I was writing the opening passage quoted above, I became aware of having language preferences regarding the sound and expressiveness of certain groups of words in the text. Experimenting with the proposed ability to switch languages rapidly in the podcast developed my translingual sensibility (Kellman and Stavans 2015). Translingualism, a term coined by Steven Kellman in his book Translingual Imagination (Kellman 2000), refers to the combined use of multiple languages by writers, and by speakers in communities worldwide. In sound poetry studies, it is noteworthy that Hugo Ball’s seminal sound poem Gadji Beri Bimba (1916) has been analysed from a multilingual perspective (Rummens 2009). As pointed out by Rummens, the text could have been shaped, in a carnivalesque fashion, from fragments of Italian, Romanian, Swedish, Turkish, German and English. Since multilingual speakers account today for more than half of the world’s population (Valdés 2019), scholars have been referring to a paradigm shift integrating translingualism as a key practice for social integration (Zhang-Wu 2021). In light of this shift, I see my hostess persona not only as playing with the sound of languages and in tune with a growing number of contemporary practices and investigations addressing translingualism, but also as immersed — within the sonic fiction proposed — in the distortions, delays and glitches that transmission devices introduce. These digital interferences can be heard both in the Introduction section [0:00–2:10] and in the end speech of the hostess section [5:40–6:20].

Vocal Blendings and Phantasised Bodies

Besides human oral communication, several science fiction works have incorporated inventive types of communication between different terrestrial and extraterrestrial beings. The movie Contact (Zemeckis 1997) with its use of Lincos (Lingua Cosmica), an artificial interstellar language based on physics and mathematics, and the movie Arrival (Villeneuve 2016), inspired by gestural communication and diverse models in linguistics, are examples illustrating a variety of approaches. Watching Jupiter and Saturn during the great conjunction event in the countryside, with dogs howling and cows mooing, made me think of Arthur Simack’s short science fiction story Desertion (1944), which follows the story of a commander/explorer and his dog, on Jupiter. The pair are turned into ‘loopers’ using a futuristic machine, which allows them to inhabit the gigantic planet. On Jupiter, transformed, they can communicate telepathically and more empathically than they could in their former earthly bodies. I envisaged the podcast sonically blending my perceptual experience the night I observed the planets in conjunction with Simack’s short story. Figure 5, based on the notion of Conceptual Integration Networks (Fauconnier and Turner 1998), presents the different elements considered for the sonic blending.

As inputs for the ‘blended’ space, Figure 5 lists the two planets in conjunction and the species of farm animals that were more noticeable in that night’s soundscape. Probes have recorded the winds of Venus and Mars, as well as Saturn’s moon, Titan, but not the winds of Jupiter and Saturn, as of yet. I processed recordings of strong winds on Earth, with the intention of creating fictional winds for these planets. To blend the vocalisations of the farm animals that I recorded that night with the planetary sounds of Jupiter and Saturn, I tried different kinds of sound-processing separately and in combinations, using the open-source environment Cecilia. After completing the blending of the wind and the mooing that can be heard in section [2:10–2:55], I struggled to apply a similar approach to blend the wind and the howling using convolutions and reverberations, until I changed track to experiment with modules in Cecilia that were more rhythmically oriented. This led me to a first blend that can be heard in section [5:04 – 5:30], displaying a trail of sounds resembling sharply plucked strings, or a whip snapped vigorously. I related this processed sound to the commander’s dominant relationship with the dog. The rhythmic processing provided a second blend that can be heard in section [4:00–4:50], featuring successive heavier and lighter claps — ones that I would describe as ‘grassy’ yet also ‘flossy’ and ‘crispy’ — as imagined steps of the commander and the dog together on Jupiter, after the transformation.

The piece attempts to entice the listener’s imagination, sketching fleeting auditory images. Besides sonic blendings, to call for an aural experience within the sonic fiction proposed, I explored sound spatialisation. This process will be discussed in the following section.

Immersive Au(O)ralities

Conjunction Podcast was first recorded as a stereo piece for headphones, then spatialised for eight channels as shown in Figure 6.

The spatialisation schemes of Figure 6 follow the form of the piece, which was announced by the hostess in the introduction: three female guest artists, Maria Sappho, Leah Stuttard and Isabella Ruiz Gallardo perform vocal improvisations related to the 2020 conjunction event; then they read excerpts from the short science fiction story by Simack set on Jupiter; after which, finally, a scientist is interviewed to comment on experiments shedding light on biological adaptation processes to outer space environments. The headphone version and the multichannel version provide different experiences in terms of aurality. Aurality is defined in the project as the complex disposition to relate actual or potential sound sources, mobilising our attentional capacity, our sensitivity, and our understanding as listeners (Noudelmann 2020). Research has shown that the aural experience of podcast listeners is characterised by variable degrees of intimacy, sociality, flexibility and interest-based curios-ity (Tobin and Guadagno 2022). Therefore, transposing the headphones’ stereo version of Conjunction Podcast to a multichannel arrangement involved exploring how spatialisation could change these features.

I took the opportunity with spatialisation to distance the sources of the voice and the glitching sounds in the hostess’s speech, with the intention of activating the listener’s curiosity for the scattered sonic disruptions at the beginning of the piece. I paired speakers following different band frequencies for the blending of the mooing and the wind to enhance the immersive effect. Additionally, I used spatialisation to devise sonic paths for the steps of the commander and the dog transformed on Jupiter. These paths were oriented in an anticlockwise manner to correspond with Jupiter’s rotation. Some of the techniques just listed are usually combined in multichannel works of electroacoustic music. The placement of sounds, considering different listening spots and panning, helped to create the basis of the aural space for the piece in the auditorium, and distribution of spectral bands, a technique more recently added in electroacoustic music (Stavropoulos 2018), helped enhance the immersive effect mentioned above. I was supported by my colleague Hernández, a researcher at the University of Leeds, in the implementation of these techniques for the spatialised version. In terms of aesthetics, when devising the multichannel setting, I attempted to draw from theatricality and experimental stage configurations in which the audience is surrounded by the performers (Grotowski 2012), remembering my inclination for experimental theatre, which began at a young age. I explored examples in the repertoire of electroacoustic works for spatialised works such as Le noir de l’étoile (Grisey 2004); Sagittarius A* (2017) by Natasha Barrett, for violin and live electronics, with sonic textures inspired by scientific observations of the super massive black hole Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy (Barrett 2017); and Dithyramb – Kepler 69c (2016) by Trevor Wishart. Hernández and I had the opportunity to present Wishart’s piece for eight channels at the University of Leeds in 2023, followed by a talk the composer gave discussing the main ideas inspiring his album The Secret Resonance of Things (Wishart 2017).

The voices of the three female guests, distributed diagonally across pairs of speakers covering a large area of the listeners’ space, illustrate this intention. During the presentation at the Huddersfield Electric Spring Festival, I remember the experience of triggering the piece in the dark from the mixing desk located at the centre of the oval array of speakers, and listening to it, with the audience sitting in rows inside this oval, as being solemn, comic and cosmic at the same time. I imagined that, collectively, we were experiencing a possible new way of being informed, entertained, questioned, transported, and moved through a sonic proto-engine under test. From different conversations with the attendees, hearing the descriptor “elegant” for the work resonated with the solemn impression I had of it; the adjective came from a visitor I met, a researcher in electronic music and history. A younger student, working at the School’s music technology store, said “It was like you were immersed with the sounds (…), with the cow mooing and the wind, and it felt like I was in the field or in a forest (…) with the speakers in the front, it felt like someone was there (…) with the sound effects (…)”. Leah Stuttard, who contributed to the piece with vocal improvisation and as a reader, commented: “I love the idea that it would be a podcast, you know, a podcast that doesn’t impart information as such, that just gives you a sensory experience (…); it’s funny, it’s humorous and it’s beautiful (…) it’s almost soothing, as well (…) and ethereal”. Regarding the passage with the scientists at the end, she said: “I can tell that they are British men, but you can’t really hear the words (…) but I love that it seems as if they were talking inside a big bell; there was a lovely colour, it was almost like a flavour, actually, that surrounded them; I really enjoyed it”. As a contrast, when listening to the piece, a composer at a masterclass I attended recommended using only English, which I objected to on the basis of the arguments aligned with the translingual paradigm discussed above.

In a subsequent phase of the investigation, more abstract aspects of vocal processing were explored, within the context of au(o)rality, sonic fiction, and interstellar communication. Sound-art installation and collaborative interdisciplinary work helped in shaping this subsequent phase.

Sp(l)ace Making Through Sound Art Installation

The programmes Cultures of Place (2022) and Cultures of Sound (2023) were the niches in which Es-tela É-toile Confab was developed. These programmes, organised by the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Huddersfield, integrated artworks, workshops, talks and discussions about place and sound. In connection with the research project, I proposed for Cultures of Place the concept of ‘sp(l)ace’. By thinking that place rhymes with space, pace, and trace, I joined the discussion of creative placemaking (Courage 2021) opened in the programme’s seminars by blending the words place and space — the latter considered in the context of astronomy. A reference was made in the seminars to philosopher Jane Bennett’s definition of ecology as the study of the place where we live, considering that “place is as a dynamic flow of matter — energy that tends to settle into various bodies, bodies that often join forces, make connections, form alliances” (Bennett 2004, 36). I see and hear reflections of the sound-art installation Es-tela É-toile Confab in this quotation. I projected the piece as a canvas for the voices of women in the field of science communication, processed in an au(o)ral flow, that could suggest that they were threading the universe, whether actually or metaphorically, and confabulating.

Shared Sp(l)ace, Roaming Sound Clusters

Es-tela É-toile Confab was developed in several phases: the first was in 2022, with the exhibition Stellatrix as part of the Cultures of Place programme in Huddersfield, UK, which served as a pre-compositional stage. The second was in 2023, during my residency and exhibition St-arts/ Star*ts for the Cultures of Sound programme at the Bath House Galleries, in which the form of the composition took shape. As part of this residency, I invited three artists to install works in progress and pieces with poetic approaches to the cosmos in the shared sp(l)ace of the galleries to stimulate discussion and seek meeting points in a creative environment. The following text was written to document how the sound art installation Es-tela É-toile Confab was conceived in this collaborative environment, threading the voices of the participating artists.

St-arts / Star*ts

The sound art installation project St-arts / Star*ts, sitting at the intersection between art and science, comprises two sonic compositions: Helium Burning and Es-tela É-toile Confab. They are generated from the interpretation of astrochemical data and processes as musical parameters, and from devising an experimental metaphor to work with the voices of three female astrophysicists and science communicators: Dr Julieta Fierro, Dr Catherine Walsh and Dr Teresa Paneque. To create the installation, the composers collaborated with an artist and a researcher in e-textiles and knitted textiles. Through these collaborative works, visitors were introduced to cosmic sonic blends, synaesthetic experiences of micro-macro scales, and unheard conversations threading models and speculative representations of the universe. The following texts give an overview of each of the collaborative spaces composing the exhibition.

Walk-through Star*ts Cluster 1

Following conversations at ACME studios in London between Inês Rebelo, artist, and Juan Hernández, music researcher, ideas were proposed to work on an initial creative mixed media cluster investigating our closest star’s present stage and evolution. Reflecting on the Sun’s activity during the Anthropocene, Rebelo contributed to the project with a series of drawings titled Radioastronomy (Here Comes the Sun) (2018).

In the limelight of space, Two Suns (2023) focuses on the Sun’s outer layer, the corona, as Rebelo comments:

In Two Suns the faint tenuous solar corona takes centre stage as a painting turns into installation in red, orange, and charcoal hues. The scene highlights the scale of the sun’s magnetic fields and invites us to touch a mandarin above the horizon, posing as a cosmic latte (the average colour of the universe found by a team of astronomers).

Within the same cluster, Hernández created the generative composition Helium Burning (2023), investigating audible mappings of the helium burning stage in a red giant star, a stage our Sun will reach one day. To pinpoint the main aspect of the music research Hernández was undertaking with his composition, he explains:

The [sic] cosmic chemical evolution processes, such as stellar and explosive nucleosynthesis, account for the emergence of an extensive variety from the elementary structure of the hydrogen atom. Helium Burning examines the triple-al-pha process in the core of a red giant star, by which three helium nuclei fuse into a carbon nucleus. The piece is structured upon initial number density ratios of helium, beryllium and carbon nuclei in each of the three steps of the process.

Rebelo devised the intervention depicted in the following image, with vinyl letters on glass, featuring equations related to the three steps of this process.

More than one walking path through the space is available to visitors to discover the perceptual meeting points and to trace the links between painting, installation, the series of meditative drawings, and the generative composition featuring sonified astro-chemical processes.

Walk-through St-arts/Star*ts Cluster 2

Ángela Hoyos Gómez, music researcher, is collaborating with Amy Chen, a researcher in e-textiles and knitted textiles, to highlight the presence of women in astronomy through an immersive installation of sculptural textiles and processed vocal sounds, forming the first stage of a sonic composition in progress. Chen’s creative interest in the theme of collaboration led to the creation of four textile pieces.

Chen observes that:

Materials and knit structures were used to show the different densities and scales of objects in space: fine lurex knitted with multiple ends of black yarn to portray distant starscapes and slub yarn to create foreground stars of varying sizes. In reference to starts and star*ts, the laddering and floats of yarn at the bottom of the fabric depict the process of creation, with the loose and open yarn structure progressively becoming denser moving up the fabric.

Chen and Hoyos Gómez placed together the four knitted pieces, considering the location of the four speakers for the quadraphonic composition, and aiming to unfold potential paths for visitors to discover the textile artwork in conjunction with the sound. The concept behind the sonic composition Hoyos Gómez presented in the gallery, titled Es-tela É-toile Confab, is based on the metaphor of an evolving interwoven universe, hinted at by the string theory model, in which strings of different vibrational states interact with each other, forming the basis of material bonds.

This metaphor also draws from myths depicting narratives in which female characters such as Neith (Egypt) or the Fates (Greece) are twining the threads of life in connection with universal forces. The sound spatialisation also follows the knitted universe metaphor. Pairs of speakers as sources of processed vocal sounds act as sonic yarns, interlaced in time, in each of the three sections of the piece.

St-arts / Star*ts aftermath

During the residency, Hoyos Gómez and Hernández spent time roaming the galleries while listening to the quadrophonic installations simultaneously playing their two sound compo-sitions, Es-tela É-toile confab and Helium Burning. The installations were situated in close proximity to one another, and no walls separated the rooms. After the residency, they merged the two compositions in the studio and called the resulting hybrid piece Fusing Étoilium.

Final Remarks

Au(o)rality circulates with sound poets in a variety of evolving formats. Conjunction Podcast is an experimental work, echoing prior approaches to radio art exemplified by pieces made by Mexican avant-garde sound poets in the 1920s, and by Scandinavian text-sound creators from the 1950s. A hybrid approach, combining the podcast format in conjunction with an eight-speaker ring design, affords audience members different degrees of closeness with the vocal performers and the atmospheres evoked, stimulating their senses and imagi-nations. Es-tela É-toile Confab depicts, like its sister piece Conjunction Podcast, a sonic fiction in outer space. As a sound art piece, the work threads connections with the visitors, involving walking paths in addition to stimuli from artworks located nearby and from the in-situ soundscape. My collaborator Hernández and I took the opportunity to create a new sound composition, Fusing Étoilium, that merged our sound art works Es-tela É-toile Confab and Helium Burning and presented it in nearby gallery spaces. Our shared interest in the music and astronomy dyad and our joint exploration of microsounds through granulators for voices and synthesisers fostered their merging.

As future directions of research, the project suggests that exploring the 4E cognition model— comprising embedded, embodied, extended and enacted cognition (Regina 2025) — can help us to continue investigating how sonic creativity can be connected to our affective grasp and logical understanding of reality. Participatory experiences in installation artworks that involve visitors in the sonic exploration of the unique grain of their voices (Barthes 2009), shaped by individual and collective crea(Au(O))ralities, can be envisaged for this purpose.

As a creative writing exercise, I propose this poetic (bl)end to the article:

Zound-poet (in her cos/mic) re-cites:

At the edge of the col – t i m e – lapse

the end or the (bl)end?

Your songs turned into Sun(gs)

blo-wings gliding

bluewings

bluewings

blowing out

Your Sun(gs) Your

Your inner calls.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Notes

^* Artículo de investigación.

Additional information

CÓMO CITAR: Hoyos Gómez, Ángela. 2026 “Au(o)rality in Sound Poetry Works Inspired by Stellar Metaphors.” Cuadernos de Música, Artes Visuales y Artes Escénicas 21 (2): 230-251. https://doi.org/10.11144/javeriana.mavae21-2.aspw

Descargar