Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and writer. Chattopadhyay produces works for exhibition, installation, and live performance addressing contemporary issues of environment and ecology, migration, and decoloniality. His works have been widely exhibited, performed, or presented globally. Chattopadhyay has an expansive body of scholarly publications in media art history, sound studies, artistic research, media theory, and aesthetics in leading peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of five books, including The Nomadic Listener (2020), The Auditory Setting (2021), Between the Headphones (2021), and Sound Practices in the Global South (2022). Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in Artistic Research and Sound Studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University. Currently, he is a Visiting Professor at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM), Basel, Switzerland, and a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD), University of Bergen, Norway.

Seminar I

Sonic Proximity: Studies in Interpersonal and Cultural Encounters in the Field of Sound

Friday 4th - Saturday 5th October 2024, at KMD, UiB, in collaboration with BEK

Sound travels from one body to another, and from one geography to another. On its paths, it makes a myriad of connections. An utterance connects a voice to its listener based on its manifold positionalities; thus, knowledge is shared in a society. This social capacity of listening is significant when we think of sound in terms of the intricacies of communication and engaging in everyday contexts, enhancing capacities to connect and build a relational world. Recently, Peruvian scholar Marisol de la Cadena suggested in a talk that ‘there is no singular world, or many discreet worlds. There are only connections and relations.’ Resonating with these relational dynamics and potentialities embedded in (co-)sounding and listening, this first seminar from a series of critical gatherings around the topic of sonic relationality and confluence, engages with thoughts and perspectives on sonic interactions across a diverse range of scenarios and experiences, from personal to collective, and from social to political. The gathering examines interpersonal and cultural encounters in the field of sound and listening from a micro-scale (interpersonal exchanges through intimacies of listening) to a macro-scale (acoustic communication between critical regions of a planetary society, e.g., between Global Norths and Global Souths). This more comprehensive range and scalability of the discourse aims to shed light on the fundamental issues in sonic exchanges, contributing to the studies of globalization concerned with intercultural encounters and media technological transmissions between Global North and South as a two-way process of confluence, as well as the listening that unfolds between peoples impacted by the larger socio-political forces of co-sounding. 

Books/Monographs:

2025: Connecting Resonances: Perspectives on Sonic Relationality and Decolonial Listening. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. (In progress).                   

Book chapters:

2025: “Sharawadi Effect”. In Bull, M and Verma, N. (eds.), The Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of Sound Studies. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. (In progress).

2025: “Against Soundscape: Musings on Auditory Situationism and Adaptive Perception”. In Waterman, Ellen (ed.), R. Murray Schafer’s Ecologies of Music and Sound Re-examined. McGill-Queen University Press. (In progress).        

2025: “Decomposing Landscapes: Sonic Mediation and the Climate Crises.” In Climate Change and Audiovisual Media. London: Routledge. (In progress).  

2024: “Unlistening”. In Zinovieff, Søndergaard, et al (eds.), Situated Listening: Attending to the unheard. London: Routledge. (In press)

2024: “Technologies of Capture and the Global Souths.” In Rudi, J. and Adkins, M. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook to Rethinking the History of Technology-Based Music. London: Routledge. (In press).        

Journal articles:

2024: "Indo Sonic Futurism", Organised Sound, Cambridge University Press. (In review).        

Exhibitions:

2025: The Listening Society, Hear Here Festival, Leuven, April – May.

https://www.stuk.be/en/residences/budhaditya-chattopadhyay-dhv%C4%81ni

2024: Swār from Dhvāni project, House of Digital Art, Mauritius, April.

https://houseofdigitalart.io/toutes-les-iles-sont-des-arbres/

2024: Co-sounding: Towards a Sonorous Land, Errant Sound gallery, Berlin, February

https://errantsound.net/2024/02/co-sounding-towards-a-sonorous-land-budhaditya-chattopadhyay/

2023: Co-sounding: Towards a Sonorous Land, Polyphonic Landscapes, Zone2Source, Amsterdam, October – December. https://polyphoniclandscapes.artez.nl and https://zone2source.net/en/tentoonstelling/polyphonic-landscapes-2/

Conference presentations, talks, etc.:

2024: “Co-sounding: Towards an environmental coalescence,” Politics of the Machines: Lifelikeness & beyond - Aachen 2024.

2024: “Skin-Tone,” Whiteness and Sound Studies, University of Arts, Helsinki.

2024: “Audio Leakage Community,” Panel, in Leakage: The Inaugural Conference of stsing, TU Dresden, 19^th – 22^nd of March 2024.

2024: “Listening Across the Souths.” Monday lectures, KMD, UiB. 8 January.

2023: “Post-immersive Listening: Perspectives on the Mediation of Sonic Environments,” Keynote, in Beyond Listening: Agency, Art and the Environment International Symposium on Sonic Ecologies, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest (MOME), 22 – 25 November.