"Performing Listening in Practice and through Traces: Re-enactments of Nineteenth-century Mediatized Sound"
Date: 8 July 2026
Time: 4.30 - 5.30 pm
Location: TBC, Rodestraat 14, 2000 Antwerp (University of Antwerp city campus)
How have performative cultures shaped sonic media and ways of listening? How can we access the roles that sensory experience has played in histories of knowledge production?
This talk embarks on living histories of sound in the nineteenth century. We will engage these questions in a media archaeological exploration of listening. During the nineteenth century, acoustic experience changed radically. New scientific research, technologies, and artistic experimentations intertwined to create different understandings of sonic phenomena. An important development of this acoustic modernity was the elaboration of technical devices that amplified, recorded, transduced, and visualized sounds.
My research looks at the crucial role that performances of listening had in shaping, sharing, and substantiating this sonic knowledge. One had to learn to listen differently for the phonographs, telephones, earphones, and microphones to work at all. Addressing traditions of interplay between performative cultures and media developments, this talk focuses on how theatres, scientific demonstrations, and industrial exhibitions staged modes of mediatized listening. I’ll share my re-enactment practices by reconstructing a little-known sound media called the theatrophone. Engaging performative and multi-modal approaches, I’ll reveal the bodily choreographies, the sensory skills, and the scenographic tools that were used to help people make sense of new sonic worlds. One aim is to reflect on what modes of artistic research help bring attention to overlooked material, sensory and affective traces of past media, and how such traces might be engaged for examining listening practices today.
About Melissa Van Drie
Melissa Van Drie is a researcher and artist, specializing in cultural histories of sound and listening (nineteenth-twenty-first centuries). Currently she is Fellow in “Futures in Artistic Research” at the Orpheus Instituut for Advanced Studies and Research in Music in Ghent. She holds degrees in music performance and musicology, literature and theatre studies (Emory, NYU, Sorbonne Nouvelle). Her research explores sensory practices, performance, and material culture in knowledge production across the arts and sciences.
Her PhD (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3) explored the intersections of science and theatre in the elaboration of nineteenth-century sound media. Her most recent project Sounds Delicious Project explores listening and sonic creation in food-making and was funded by a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship. She has held research fellowships at the University of Cambridge, University of Copenhagen, the Sorbonne, the CNRS, and University of Maastricht. She has also taught arts-research at Royal Danish Academy of Art, the ÉSAD Grénoble-Valence, and the Beaux Arts de Paris. Please see her academia.edu page for publications.