The Aural Aesthetics of Modernity: From the Philips Pavilion to EMPAC (2025)

In autumn 2023, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Music and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute presented Shifting Center, an exhibition exploring sound through geological formations, cultural artefacts, and higher-order ambisonics. Curators Vic Brooks and Nida Ghouse framed ‘shifting centre’ as a metaphor for dislocation and marginalised peripheries. However, we argue that the aurality of EMPAC itself – marked by abstraction, isolation and immersion – ultimately muted this decolonial potential. By tracing a lineage of spatial audio from the 1958 Philips Pavilion, we examine how architectural acoustics shape the possibilities of what can be heard in EMPAC, limiting the aural and more-than-aural reception of works presented there.

Co-authored with Alexis Bhagat. Published in Organised Sound Journal, Cambridge University Press. URL

Situated Listening: Attending to the Unheard (2025)

Edited by: Stephanie Loveless, Tullis Rennie, Morten Søndergaard, Freya Zinovieff

Grounded in a conviction that how we listen matters deeply in the context of ongoing social, political, and ecological crises, Situated Listening: Attending to the Unheard sets forth a collection of methodologies and creative proposals for listening, advancing the framework of situated listening as both a theoretical concept and a methodological practice that investigates relationships between the listening body and the politics of place, space, and culture.

Routledge URL

A Year of Deep Listening: 365 Text Scores for Pauline Oliveros (2025)

Edited by Stephanie Loveless

A Year of Deep Listening is a publication of 365 scores for listening gathered in celebration of the legacy of groundbreaking composer Pauline Oliveros.

An expression of the Deep Listening community, the scores were created by over 300 artists—ranging from prize winning composers to ear-minded grocery store clerks, from those who worked closely with Oliveros for decades to those who never met her.

Terra Nova Press URL

Scores for Listening in a Time of Climate Disruption (2024)

A catalog essay written for the Getty PST ART exhibition, Atmosphere of Sound. URL

This Street is a Song: Situated Listening in Contested Sites (2024)

This chapter shares practices of situated listening on the street in Albany, NY, where I live, and argues for practices of attending to the hyperlocal (or “going nowhere”) and resisting outputs and outcomes (or “doing nothing”) as powerful tools for unsettling listening habits as well as settler-colonial disciplinary norms.

Published in Disruption and Convergence: Generating New Conversations Through Arts Research. (Bourgault, R. and Rosamond, C., eds. Brill/Sense, Leiden, Netherlands.) URL

Situated Listening: Partial Perspectives and Critical Listening Positionality (2023)

This paper (co-authored with Freya Zinovieff), explore’s the tensions between Pauline Oliveros’ expansive and experiential practice of Deep Listening, and the prospect of critical listening positionality proposed by Dylan Robinson. Thinking alongside Robinson, Oliveros, and decolonial scholars such as Rolando Vasquez, we propose frameworks for situated listening that acknowledge the partial perspective of our own listening, while allowing for the porous and transformative experience of attunement to the many presences within, and histories of, the places and times we are embedded in.

Published in Acoustic Ecology Review, Vol. 1 No. 1: Proceedings of 'Listening Pasts, Listening Futures' 2023 World Forum for Acoustic Ecology Conference. URL

Review of Tomie Hahn’s Arousing Sense: Recipes for Workshopping Sensory Experience (2023)

Published in Composition Studies Journal, Summer 2022. UMass, Boston. URL

Tactical Soundwalking in the City: A Feminist Turn from Eye to Ear (2020)

Published in Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 30. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA URL