A Life in Sound: Transforming Understandings of Health and Wellbeing through Music, Sonic Arts, and Modes of Listening

This practice-based project explores how music, sound, and modes of listening can transform understandings of the human body. It establishes a new theoretical framework of corporeal acoustemology: a mode of embodied, auditory knowledge of the body as sonic field. Using the compositional methodology of artistic sonation, biomedical and experiential information is creatively transducted and expressed through music and sonic arts. At the intersection of health humanities, sound studies, and composition, this project asks how non-lexical sonic artworks might express physiological processes; how corporeal listening can foster affiliation and address health misinformation; and how these approaches can be ethically and creatively evaluated. Outputs include a monograph, composition portfolio, listening events, a radio documentary series, and an interdisciplinary conference. The project also engages with medical sound archives, illness narratives, and develops engaged research events involving participants from boroughs with significant health inequalities. While sound and music are often associated with therapeutic practices and creative health activities, the objective of this project is to extend beyond these applications, positioning sonic artworks and musical compositions as significant psychosocial resources and interventions in their own right which, in turn, help people better understand their bodies and foster beneficial, relational, corporeal listening practices.