Soundtracks: Maria Sappho and Colin Frank

Maria Guerra Sappho is an artist and researcher exploring techno-social communities, experimental instrument-building, and artificial intelligence in creative practice. Her work navigates diaspora, ecology, cultural memory, and postcolonial histories through posthuman feminist and techno-moral lenses.

Colin Frank is a percussionist, field recordist, installation artist, improviser, and multimedia composer. His works range from investigating found objects to machine noises, theatrical absurdity to site-specific performance, and audience interactivity to DIY electronics.

This workshop introduces two connected projects exploring sound as a shared, embodied, and community practice.

We will begin with ZEMI, an interactive textile instrument ( a ‘magic carpet) that responds to touch and movement. Participants will explore how simple gestures, can activate sound, stories, and sonic textures. The instrument invites us to think about music-making not as something owned by one person, but as something we build together in space.

Alongside this, we will share work from the Digital Playgrounds for Music project at the University of Huddersfield, including the Listening Playground web app. This tool offers accessible ways to approach field recording, deep listening, and collaborative sound mapping, helping people engage creatively with the sounds of their own environments.

Across the session, we will explore how movement, the body, and our world are connected in musical creativity. Exploring tactile instrument design and accessible approaches to field recording that help us share the sonic story of the world around us. These recordings become the material for building shared sound maps of place, bringing together different perspectives, memories, and ways of hearing. Along the way, we reflect on the role of technology in this process, how it can be used as a supportive, inclusive tool for participatory music-making and collaborative listening.

No prior musical or technical experience is needed. The workshop is open to anyone interested in listening, making, and thinking together through sound. You are welcome to bring an electronic instrument if you have one, which you can play with the carpet with, but no need to bring anything either!

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