RESONANCE is a performance-research project situated between sound art, composition, and embodied participation. It explores how carefully designed sonic environments can shape attention, emotion, and social connection in a collective setting, using the tools of psychoacoustics (space, timbre, dynamics) and rhythm-based entrainment as compositional material. The work is structured as a modular journey rather than a fixed “show”: each iteration is built from repeatable performance modules that can evolve with ongoing research. Spatial sound is central, treating the venue as an instrument. By choreographing distance, motion, externalisation, and envelopment, RESONANCE composes with the listener’s perception of space, turning sound into an architecture that can feel intimate, expansive, grounding, or energising. A key module explores rhythmic stimulation, including a 40 Hz pulse as one layer within a broader musical texture. This draws on research into sensory gamma-frequency stimulation and its relationship to attention and cognition, while maintaining a non-clinical framing: in RESONANCE, 40 Hz is used as an artistic parameter and a potential research stimulus, not as a therapeutic claim. Another module shifts toward slow pacing and recovery, using breath guidance around ~0.1 Hz (approximately six breaths per minute), a rhythm associated in HRV biofeedback research with autonomic regulation and improved heart-rate variability. A movement chapter brings the work into dance: tempo becomes an external clock and a social cue, inviting synchrony and raising physiological activation. This section is informed by evidence that acute exercise can influence mood and wellbeing through neuromodulatory pathways, including consistent findings of increased endocannabinoids such as anandamide following exercise.
A collaboration between sound artist and composer Mimi Xu and movement artist and yoga practitioner Anna de Pahlen, RESONANCE is designed as an inclusive community gathering for people of different ages and backgrounds, staged in cultural spaces with strong architectural identity so audiences encounter contemporary culture while participating in a shared experience. The project integrates a light evaluation layer (brief post questionnaires and optional in-situ micro-ratings) to document perceived changes in attention, affect, embodiment, and togetherness, and to support future collaboration with scientists and labs.
RESONANCE was first presented at Houghton Festival and subsequently at the Fondation Beyeler in September 2025, where it was experienced as part of the museum’s Sound Garden program. These premieres introduced audiences to the work as both a site-specific performance and a shared ritual of sound, movement, and presence.
Stay tuned...