Overview
RESONANCE is a performance-research work positioned at the intersection of sound art, psychoacoustics, and embodied participation. Conceived as a living inquiry rather than a fixed production, it examines how precisely structured sonic environments act upon attention, emotional regulation, and the felt sense of social belonging — drawing on established findings in auditory neuroscience, autonomic physiology, and the emerging evidence base for arts-based wellbeing interventions. The work is composed as a modular sequence: each chapter deploys distinct acoustic and rhythmic strategies, informed by peer-reviewed research, yet delivered within an artistic frame that prioritises experience over protocol. This is not clinical intervention. It is careful artmaking that takes the body seriously.
The Sonic Architecture
The venue itself is the instrument. Through the choreography of spatial audio — distance, motion, externalisation, and envelopment — RESONANCE constructs an acoustic environment that listeners inhabit rather than merely observe. Psychoacoustic research confirms that spatial sound design significantly modulates arousal, valence, and immersive attention; here, those properties become compositional decisions, shaping each participant's felt sense of presence.
Mental Wellbeing as Artistic Intention RESONANCE holds mental wellbeing not as a clinical outcome but as a conscious artistic decision — a commitment to composing with the body's own capacity for regulation, connection, and renewal. Each module tends to a different dimension of inner life, together offering a complete emotional arc: grounding, activation, recovery, and uplift. The protocol draws on a set of modules selected and sequenced for each site. Among them: 136.1 Hz — the Earth's orbital resonance transposed into the audible range, the tuning frequency of the tanpura, and the acoustic foundation of the syllable Om — offers stillness and orientation, ancient in cultural lineage and measurable in its calming effect on cortical arousal. A 40 Hz rhythmic pulse sharpens collective attention through gamma-frequency neural entrainment, a moment of heightened perceptual acuity experienced together. Elsewhere in the protocol, 0.1 Hz breath pacing — six cycles per minute — invites parasympathetic restoration, improved heart-rate variability, and a measurable reduction in anxiety. Across its modules, RESONANCE describes something that evidence-based wellbeing research recognises but rarely stages as art: the full arc of a nervous system tenderly, deliberately, brought back into coherence.
The Artists
RESONANCE is a collaboration between sound artist and composer Mimi Xu and movement artist and yoga practitioner Anna de Pahlen. Together they bring complementary bodies of knowledge — in spatial composition, somatic practice, and contemplative movement — to a work designed as an inclusive community gathering: open to participants of different ages, backgrounds, and levels of physical mobility. Staged in venues of strong architectural and cultural identity, RESONANCE situates its participants within the living tradition of contemporary art while offering something more immediate: a shared ritual of sound, breath, and presence.
Performance History
RESONANCE was first presented at Houghton Festival, 2025, before its institutional premiere at the Fondation Beyeler, September 2025, as part of the museum's Sound Garden programme. At Beyeler, participants encountered the work within one of Europe's leading modern and contemporary art contexts — framing RESONANCE not as therapeutic event but as a rigorously considered artistic proposition about what sound can do to, and for, the human body in a room full of other human bodies. RESONANCE was next presented at SOMA, Geneva in May — a former metal factory transformed into a pioneering contemporary art centre that operates deliberately at the crossroads of gallery and institution, and whose commitment to experimentation and cross-disciplinary exchange made it a natural home for the work. RESONANCE will next be presented at Hangar Y, Meudon, on Saturday 11th July 2026 — a former airship hangar of singular industrial scale and history, now reimagined as a site for ambitious cultural production, offering the work a resonant architecture in the most literal sense.
Stay tuned...