SU Studio Talk 64: Victoria Pham – Archaeoacoustics & Bioacoustics

Spanning art, technology and science, Victoria Pham is an Australian artist, evolutionary biologist, writer and composer based between Paris and Sydney. Originally trained as an archaeologist, she is a current PhD candidate in Biological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, St John’s College. Victoria is the Artistic Director of FABLE ARTS, lead artist in the RE:SOUNDING project with James Nguyen, co-lead artist in the collective SONANT BODIES with James Hazel, and host and producer of podcast series DECLASSIFY.

Victoria’s Sounds Unheard Studio Talk series, “The Practice of Listening”, is an exploration of different models of how we engage with sound from a broad range of perspectives: musical, meditative, archaeological and speculative.

In the second episode of this series, “Archaeoacoustics & Bioacoustics”, Victoria first expands on the idea of ‘listening backwards’ and how we can understand music and sounds of the past. As an archaeologist, Victoria’s interest in sound drew her to the field of archaeoacoustics, which examines the relationship between people and sound throughout history. Drawing on a range of research and creative techniques to understand and reimagine context, Victoria also attempts to ‘listen forwards’ to create and extract new sounds.

Victoria’s sound research also draws on the field of bioacoustics, a cross-disciplinary science that combines biology and acoustics. Drawing together Victoria’s interests in biological, ecological and environmental sounds, research in this field involves deep listening and record-taking to capture systems of sound making between animals, plants and organisms. Finally Victoria introduces us to soundpainting, a method of capturing and notating environmental sound materials for use in other musical and sound works.

Thank you for joining us for the second episode of Victoria’s Studio Talks series. Join us next Thursday for a new episode with Victoria and her RE:SOUNDING collaborator James Nguyen, looking at their project to reactivate a 3000-year-old Đông Sơn drum. For more information on Victoria’s work in music and archaeology, visit https://www.victoriaavpham.com/.