Sound Arguments 2026

Studied Composition at the Catholic University of Chile and Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague (NL), where he obtained his Master's degree with a focus on composition and performance of electronic music. In 2014, Juan obtained his PhD degree from Leiden University with his thesis “Multiple Paths: Towards a Performance Practice in Computer Music”. As a guitarist, Parra has participated in several courses of Guitar Craft, a school founded by Robert Fripp, becoming part of various related guitar ensembles such as the Berlin Guitar Ensemble, the Buenos Aires Guitar Ensemble, and until 2003, The League of Crafty Guitarists.

His work in the field of live electronic music has made him the recipient of numerous grants such as NFPK, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, and the International Music Council. Founder of The Electronic Hammer, a Computer and Percussion trio, and Wiregriot (voice & electronics), he collaborates regularly with Ensemble KLANG (NL) and Hermes (BE), among many others. Since 2009 Parra has been a fellow researcher at Orpheus Instituut (Ghent, BE), focused on performance practice in Computer Music.

Juan has been appointed as Regional Director for Europe of the International Computer Music Association for the period 2022-2026.

https://www.instagram.com/jotaparra/

Jacob Eriksen is an artist, curator and lecturer in the field of sound art and sound studies. Eriksen is director of the artist residency Sound Art Lab, artistic director of Struer Tracks – Biennial for Sound and Listening, founder and head of studies at 89 Sound Art School, and teaches at Sound Studies and Sonic Arts, UdK Berlin. His academic work examines ecologies and more-than-human relations through artistic practice, discourse and research in sound, while his artistic practice engages with sound synthesis and conceptual works through performances, installations, workshops and listening exercises.

http://www.jacoberiksen.dk
https://www.instagram.com/jacoberik
https://www.facebook.com/jacoberiksen/

Anette Hoffmann’s artistic, curatorial, and academic work engages with historical sound archives and audio-visual collections as sources of colonial history. Her installations and exhibitions aim to plurify the presence and audibility of historical speakers, speaking positions, narrative genres, and languages in public spaces; her work has been shown internationally since 2009. She is the author of Knowing by Ear. Listening to Voice Recordings with African Prisoners of War in German Camps (1915-1918), 2024 (Duke University Press) and Listening to Colonial History: Echoes of Coercive Knowledge Production in Historical Sound Recordings from Southern Africa (Basler Afrika Bibliographien), 2023. She is senior researcher at the Institute for African Studies and Egyptology at the University of Cologne, Germany.

https://anettehoffmann.com/

Aleksander Kolkowski is a composer, violinist and researcher who uses historical sound recording and reproduction apparatus and obsolete instruments and media to make contemporary mechanical-acoustic and electronic music. His work invites us to listen to the present through the audio technologies of the past, through acoustic and analogue recordings, sound installations and live historical re-enactments. His numerous international projects in this field have combined wax cylinder phonographs, wind-up gramophones and antique disc recording machines together with live musicians and even singing canaries. He has performed and exhibited internationally since 1985 and contributed to over 30 published recordings in multiple genres.

Awarded PhD, Brunel University (2011). Appointed Sound artist-in-residence, Science Museum, London (2012-14), culminating in the reconstruction of a giant loudspeaker horn from 1929, the largest in Britain, exhibited in The Exponential Horn: In Search of Perfect Sound (2014). Research Associateships at the Royal College of Music, London (2013) and Science Museum (2014-15). Composer-in-residence at the British Library Sound Archive (2016-18) where his sound installation Boy Wireless (2017-18) featured radio technology and archival radio broadcasts from the 1920s and 30s. Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (2019); Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Luxembourg (2019-22). Co-author of Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice (De Gruyter, 2023). He is resident in Málaga.

http://www.phonographies.org/
https://dema.uni.lu/wilcox-gay-recordio-1c10-sound-recording/

Cécile Malaspina's most recent publication is a volume she edited, From the Mental State of Noise to the New Frontiers of Techno-Human Cognition: Creative Disruptions Across AI, Gaming, Modelling, French Theory, and Politics (Routledge, 2026). After publishing An Epistemology of Noise in 2018 (Bloomsbury Academic) and the translation of Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Minnesota University Press, 2017), Cécile Malaspina became directrice de programme at the College International de Philosophie, Paris (Ciph). Her programme situated the technical concept of noise in aesthetic, social and political contexts. This gave rise to a partnership with the Dept. of Digital Humanities and the Dept. of French at King’s College London, leading to a Visiting Research Fellowship at KCL (2019-2025). She was also, until recently, programmer for Art & Curatorial Practice at the New Centre for Research and Practice (2021-2025), a non-profit Licensed US Proprietary School, authorized to provide graduate-level Seminars and certificates of competency in the arts, transdisciplinary studies, critical philosophy & social and political thought.

Cécile Malaspina is a founding member of the Noise Research Union (N.R.U.), together with Inigo Wilkins, Mattin, Sonia de Jager, Martina Raponi and Miguel Prado Casanova. She also a member of the informal Indeterminacy Group, comprising Sha Xin Wei, Alicia Juarrero, Muindi Fanuel Muindi and Sonia de Jager. She is a member of the editorial boards of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities; Copy Press; and is a guest editor at Nature: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

https://www.instagram.com/cecilemalaspina

Úna Monaghan is a harper, composer, researcher and sound artist working internationally. She collaborates, improvises and performs with poets, visual artists, computers, writers, musicians, and others. Úna also works as a sound engineer specialising in Irish traditional music, and experimental, live electronic and multichannel music. She has released two albums of her compositions, most recently Aonaracht, for solo traditional musicians and electronics. Her recent commissions include pieces for Red Note, Crash Ensemble, Ulster Orchestra and Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble. Úna performs solo and as a member of contemporary music ensemble Stone Drawn Circles. Úna received the inaugural Liam O’Flynn Award from the Arts Council of Ireland and the National Concert Hall Dublin, and held the Rosamund Harding Research Fellowship in Music at Newnham College, University of Cambridge from 2016-2019. She is a lecturer at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music (SARC) at Queen’s University Belfast, where her research examines the intersections between Irish traditional music, experimental music practices, improvisation and interactive technologies.

https://www.unamonaghan.com/
https://www.instagram.com/una_pix
https://bsky.app/profile/una-music.bsky.social

Halldór Úlfarsson is an experimental luthier and inventor of the halldorophone, an electro-acoustic instrument for working with feedbacking strings. A visual artist by training, Halldór’s interest is focused on the conditions allowing musicians to develop deep relationships with their instruments and the institutions facilitating these relationships. Halldór holds a BFA and MFA in Fine Art in time based media, an MFA in Product Design and is a PhD dropout. He is currently the resident instrument maker and fabricator at Intelligent Instruments Lab at the University of Iceland.

https://www.halldorophone.info/
https://www.instagram.com/halldorophone/

Melissa Van Drie is a researcher and artist specialising in histories of sound and listening. Holding degrees in Theatre Studies and Music, her work explores sensory practices, material culture, and histories of staging in knowledge production. She has held positions at Cambridge, the Sorbonne, Beaux Arts de Paris, the University of Copenhagen. Currently, she is Research Fellow at the Orpheus Instituut for Advanced Studies and Research in Music in Ghent. Her recent Sounds Delicious Project explores the multiple ways in which sound and vibratory sensing matter to making food and taste. One aim is to create new forms that explore the agency of nonhumans in foodways, contributing to Multispecies Anthropology and the Environmental Humanities.

https://www.instagram.com/melissavandrie/

Cathy van Eck is a composer, sound artist, and researcher in the arts. She is interested in setting her movements, actions, and gestures into relationships with a rich palette of different sounds, exploring peculiar sonic sceneries. The result could be called “performative sound art”, since it combines elements from performance art, electronic music, and visual arts. Cathy is a professor at the Academy of the Arts in Bern, Switzerland. Her book Between Air and Electricity – Microphones and Loudspeakers as Musical Instruments was published in 2017. She is a member of iii (instrument inventors initiative), an artist run organization based in The Hague, supporting new interdisciplinary practices linking performance, technology and the human senses.

www.cathyvaneck.net
www.microphonesandloudspeakers.com

Mark Peter Wright is an artist, researcher and writer. His practice mixes critical theory, sound and experimental pedagogy across installation, publication and performance. He is interested in the relationship between fieldwork, documentary forms and the gallery or studio, examining the ways technology, self and space perform agency, power and poetics. Wright is the director of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice), an interdisciplinary research centre dedicated to sound arts practice and theory based at the London College of Communication, UAL. His recent book Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice is published by Bloomsbury (2022/23).

https://markpeterwright.net/
https://bsky.app/profile/markpeterwright.bsky.social