Sonic world building: "Embracing, Unravelling and Smashing the Fantasy" by Juice

➡️ This presentation is part of IRCAM Forum Workshops Paris / Enghien-les-Bains March 202

Drawing from The Deer of Nine Colours, Hua Mulan, The Magic Flute, The Nutcracker, The Little Mermaid, The Red Shoes, Pinocchio, and The Nightingale and the Rose, the performance explores compassion, valour, enlightenment, imagination, sacrifice, obsession, curiosity, transformation, and devotion as fundamental aspects of human nature. Together, these tales form a layered sonic landscape that reflects cultural diversity, moral tension, and philosophical inquiry, grounded in their original contexts while resonating with contemporary experience.

My project employed a self-developed method termed sonic world-building, realised through an audio-led performance.

The definition of sonic world-building is informed by sonic fiction, particularly Goodman (2010) and Schulze (2020), who position it as an “element of affective culture” that offers both guidance and provocation. By exploring sound as a form of liberation and as a speculative narrative device, the project examines how sonic world-building functions as a dramaturgical tool in contemporary theatre and how it facilitates collective performance with the audience.

Both diagrams were presented during the performance.

Sonic World-Building | A Dramaturgical Tool

The creation of coherent worlds with distinct histories, geographies, and cultures is central to speculative storytelling (Stableford, 2004). Game designer Jia Ren Liao emphasises that constructing narrative through sound—where each sound effect and musical element aligns with narrative intent—constitutes sonic world-building. My approach maps sonic elements across six dimensions within the pre-existing worlds of the selected fairytales and folktales (science, society, politics, philosophy, environment, and economy), where prefabricated, present, and unpredictable sounds interact to shape the performance world.

Sonic World-Building | Collective Performance and Critical Listening

Performance art has a profound capacity to connect the performer to the present moment (Schechner, 2003). Sound artist Kate Carr argues that sonic world-building reveals how movement, interaction, and materiality influence the ways in which worlds are constructed and dismantled. Tom Tlalim suggests that critical listening resists dominant sonic meanings, enabling more reflective, collective, and open-ended forms of world-building. Informed by these perspectives, as well as The Map of Sonic Creativity (Knight-Hill & Margetson, 2023), I developed a participatory map to guide my practice.

This project was created primarily using Pro Tools and Reaper for spatial audio, ASAP and SPAT.

Credits:

Juice is a sound artist and a freelance composer, who also spans classical paintings and illustrations, three-dimensional contemporary sculpture and film, and reaches into a fourth dimension characterised by spatial sound design and digital media manipulation. Her recent sound-based work delves into the equilibrium and collision of pleasurable, disorganised, and structured sounds and noises within compositions.
http://www.juiceportfolio.com

Santiago Lowe is a member of Lowe Ensemble and has also worked as the principal cellist of the Early Music group Ars Combinatoria (Galicia, Spain) with whom he recorded J. S. Bach's Passion according to St. John and new compositions by contemporary composers. Santiago has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Arts Scholarship.
https://www.loweensemble.com/santiago-lowe

Siqi Chen is a dancer and choreographer trained in Chinese classical dance, folk dance, modern dance and ballet. She has performed across China and the UK, collaborating on diverse projects that blend art forms.