The Sonic Beings Laboratory: children as artistic researchers weaving meanings of sound by Jelizaveta Vovka

What questions emerge when children and adults engage in artistic research together, exploring sound, identity, and creativity as co-researchers? In this AR pilot project, a fourth-grade class at a Viennese elementary school, Campus Landstraße, together with three adult researchers, collaboratively shape an open-ended inquiry into the sonic. This exploratory phase should lay the groundwork for a larger artistic research project. It focuses on how children and adults collaboratively shape the direction of inquiry: What questions related to sound matter to us? How do we, together, engage with sound as material, metaphor, and method? And how do the modes of questioning transform our understanding of what artistic research can become? Guided by principles of Participatory Action Research and entangled sound-making, this pilot creates an open, flexible space, the Sonic Beings Laboratory, where research practices are not delivered or taught, but discovered in collaboration. It is a space where children and adults co-develop questions, sub-projects, and methods through relational and creative engagement. As adult researchers and artists, we were not external observers but co-learners—creating alongside the children, responding to their sonic ideas, and reflecting on our own evolving practices. Our field notes, sketches, and interventions were not supplementary; they were integral to the research process, allowing us to trace how the project challenged our assumptions and shifted our ways of listening and making. This pilot is not about finding answers. It is about staying with the questions that emerge through our shared inquiry, attending to how our research practice unfolds, and how all participants are changed through the process.

This sub-project by Mbappe and Alx unfolds as a visual and sonic narrative in four parts. Through drawing, sound design, and storytelling, they created a world that moves between outer space and earthly encounters. Working with the Koala app, they designed soundscapes to accompany their images, combining rhythm, texture, and voice. Each drawing reveals a different moment in an unfolding story, from distant observation to arrival, contact, and transformation. The result is a world both imagined and heard, where the boundaries between the real and the speculative begin to blur.

Now we are on Earth. The grass stretches under a pale sky, and two beings, maybe visitors, maybe new inhabitants, walk beside the landed ship. Their bodies seem to hum, half familiar, half unknown. They explore carefully, listening to the wind, the ground, the pulse of their surroundings. The air feels different here: thinner, gentler, filled with new vibrations. The moment is neither invasion nor discovery, it is a meeting, uncertain and alive.

From afar, the Earth floats quietly in a purple sky, surrounded by stars. The sun burns fiercely on one side, while the moon glows pale on the other, holding balance across the distance. It is a moment before something begins. From this perspective, Earth seems large and exciting, shimmering between light and shadow. The scene feels like a prelude: something is waiting to be heard.

The heat of the sun softens. The stars thin out, and the sky turns bright. From the quiet, a white-and-blue object appears. Part bird, part spacecraft, circling the Earth. It approaches slowly, curious and deliberate, as if guided by sound. The words on the accompanying score: “In diesem Welt es hören die Flüsse und iOiOiO ssss schschschsch”, suggest a world where rivers, air, and static noises all listen and speak. The spaceship seems to carry this with it while searching for a place to land.

The world has drastically changed. Many creatures now fill the landscape, some gathered peacefully, others armed, guarding, or hiding. Mountains rise like borders, trees like witnesses. One figure hides behind lines that look like a cell, or maybe a structure of protection. It is no longer clear who belongs here and who arrived later; the world has become layered, full of difference. What began as distant observation has become a living, complex planet, one that continues to vibrate with sound, movement, and the unknown.

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