The Sounds Delicious Project: listening and sonic creation in food-making

Have you ever listened to what you eat? During this talk, I’ll share research, methods and artworks emerging from my Sound Delicious Project. This practice-based research project studies sound and listening practices in food and taste (19th-21st Centuries). Sound is often absent in food stories. Historically in occidental cultures, the rhythms of food-makers have been deemed unpalatable to both digestion and to the aesthetic ear. This silence certainly speaks to political and epistemological histories of sound, art and knowledge production.

Addressing such silences and separations, this project investigates how sound is part of what relates the vitality of food. Engaging a range of interdisciplinary and multi-modal approaches, I explore how sound attests of dynamic relationships happening between humans and nonhumans across many sites and performances of food-making. How can thinking with sound help craft new sensibilities to and alternative stories of food production? This is an invitation to open new critical and creative pathways for sensory, performance-based research, and it permits reflecting on presumptions about categories of music-making and sonic arts, as well as definitions of listening.