Sleepwalker Archives Vol.3: Sound as a Distorter of Reality, explored the construction of reality through layered sound. Instead of treating sound as passive background or emotional enhancer, we approached it as a material agent that interferes with perception—a participant in shaping what we experience as “real.”
The exercise was structured as a collective sound experiment: each participant recorded their immediate soundscape—including ambient noise, body sounds, and soft, intentional utterances—while listening to the previous participant’s recording. The process created an evolving chain of echoing, overlapping, distorted audio layers. The result was a soundscape that was at once intimate, uncanny, and disorienting.
My keyword this week is Displacement. Listening to recordings that contain traces of past environments and voices, layered with my own real-time presence, destabilised my sense of time and space. Was I in my own room, or still partially in someone else’s sonic memory?
This experiment reminded me of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, an artist and “private ear” who uses sound as legal testimony. In works like Saydnaya (The Missing 19db) (2017), he reconstructed a Syrian torture prison through the memories of political prisoners who could only “hear” their environment. His practice reveals how sound is never neutral—it carries trauma, power, and distortion. Abu Hamdan’s work questions the reliability of hearing as evidence, just as our experiment revealed how easily reality is manipulated through loops and echoes.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Saydnaya (The Missing 19db), 2017. Screenshot from the artist’s official website. Available at http://lawrenceabuhamdan.com/saydnaya.
As I move forward with my curatorial project, this reminds me that sound can be a medium for political refusal, for constructing counter-realities, or for generating shared emotional dissonance.
Audio of the Sleepwalker sound experiment
References
Abu Hamdan, Lawrence. Saydnaya (The Missing 19db). 2017. https://lawrenceabuhamdan.com/.
Duguet, Anne-Marie. “Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Forensic Listening.” In Disonata: Art in Sound up to 1980, edited by Guy Schraenen, 174–177. Madrid: Museo Reina Sofía, 2020.
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