The Body and the Archive: Towards a Sonic Speculation

Dr Mona Hedayati, Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher at Cambridge Digital Humanities

This participatory performance explores how sound generation can act as a critical technical practice. Using wearable sensors, it transforms participants’ physiological rhythms, such as pulse, into sound, weaving them together with AI-generated sonic material trained on audio recordings of historic socio-political events. The result is a shifting acoustic environment where personal and collective intensities merge, inviting audiences to experience the interdependence between body, technology and memory. The performance asks how the act of sensing – both through machines and through the body – can become a means of connecting to histories of resistance, vulnerability and care.

The Body and the Archive proposes listening and sound-making as acts of witnessing and reciprocity. By layering traces of human physiology as a form of sensory engagement with AI-generated echoes of past struggles, the performance constructs a circular loop between body and the machine. As participants contribute with their bodily rhythms to shape a shared sonic field, they affect and are affected by the presence of the sound.

Beyond the individual dynamics, the performance creates a collective environment shaped by shared sonic material and the act of exchanging the wearable. The interplay between participants’ embodiment and the generative sound hence produces a form of co-creation where an emotional atmosphere is lived, heard and felt collectively across time, difference and distance.

For more information, visit the CDH Website.

Events are free and open to all unless otherwise stated. Please note there will be photography and recording at this event.

Please note, guests will be invited to sit on a yoga mat for this performance. If you require a chair, or have any other specific accessibility needs for this event. please get in touch at [email protected]

We will do our best to accommodate any requests.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Cambridge Digital Humanities