Notes and Reflections from our (Nico Daleman and I) visit to the TU-Berlin Electronic Music Studio | 2025.04.11

The archive asks for order before it asks for art. Our first concern is not the piece itself but the files: call numbers, transcripts, shared folders. Without a structure, the recordings scatter. Yet even this act of naming and arranging is not neutral. To place a recording in one folder and not another is already to decide its frame of meaning. Archiving is not just storage—it is composition.

Memory resists sequence. I tell Nico about the interviews with my father. His stories unfold episodically, jumping between scenes without chronology. A soldier’s absence revealed only when his cooking fire no longer burns. A memory of displacement tied not to dates but to the lullaby of a sister he could no longer hear. These fragments resist smooth arcs. They refuse the order of narrative. To impose structure would be to betray the form of memory itself.

Fidelity is never innocent. We speak of sound and realism, of the promise of “high fidelity.” But fidelity is not truth—it belongs to a Western tradition of engineering and Enlightenment clarity. A microphone does not capture reality, it shapes it. A wax cylinder hiss, a tape’s low hum—these noises are not flaws but the grain of history. To polish them away would be to erase the violence embedded in the medium. Better to let the scratches remain audible, to expose mediation as part of the listening.

Sound does not just describe bodies—it makes them.
Voices are not data points; they are bodies sounding into being. Judith Butler, Audre Lorde—voices remind us that identity is formed through utterance. My father’s recollections, my aunt’s lullaby, the chants captured under colonial surveillance—none of these are neutral signals. They are fragile presences, vulnerable bodies reconstituted each time they resound. To work with them is to touch that vulnerability again.

Listening is movement, not stasis. The concert hall fixes listeners in rows, but spatial sound opens another possibility. What if listening meant walking, shifting, wandering? Sound placed around the room could draw bodies into motion, each listener tracing their own path. Yet freedom has its own danger. To prescribe movement too tightly is to dictate interpretation. The challenge is to invite exploration without enclosing it.

Algorithms could echo kinship. We imagine generative processes, but not as abstract mathematics. What if my aunt’s lullaby became the seed of an algorithm? What if a traditional melody guided the logic of spatial placement? Code could carry lineage, turning family sound into compositional principle. Yet here too, restraint is crucial. Proliferation for its own sake risks drowning the form. Some sketches must remain sketches.

The archive is excavation, never completion. Listening is an archaeology of fragments. To dig into sound is to find shards, never the whole. Each trace carries absence as strongly as presence. Perhaps the installation should foreground this incompleteness, allowing the missing to be felt as much as the audible. To hear the archive is to listen to what is no longer there.

Editing is the art of refusal. To include everything is to blur the work. Editing means cutting away, even when every sound feels essential. Like tailoring, the form emerges not from fabric added but fabric removed. It is a discipline of sacrifice. Clarity depends on what is withheld.

Responsibility lingers in every voice. To carry my father’s wartime memories into a public installation is not neutral. To reframe colonial recordings is not innocent. Each sound demands care—how it is presented, how it is contextualized, how it is allowed to breathe. The ethics of listening must anchor the work as firmly as its artistic ambitions. ☐