Unruly sounds: Performing the hidden voices of hydroelectric power

Photo credit: UiO Energy and Environment, 2025

What happens when research meets creative practice? How can we hear hidden sounds? What is revealed and concealed when we listen to unruliness? These are some of the questions I explored in my live performance at the UiO Energy & Environment Forum in Oslo, Norway. Building on acoustic research at the Hammeren and Vamma hydroelectric power stations, I performed an improvised composition to share in-progress work and experiment with different forms of research communication.

Why sound?

The social, the spatial, and the aural are co-constituted. Sound is also relational and spatially embodied, facilitating embodied experience of spaces and uncertainties. Sound can construct space, identity and difference. Sound can reveal the exercise of power in observing who has the power to create sound, to control sounds, to mark the difference between sound and noise. These properties have sparked our investigation of sound as sociomaterial research method in the UNRULY projects.

Why performance?

I am exploring how performance be an inscription of meaning, a metaphor, an allegory, and an enactment of unruliness all at once. Sound and movement in performance can present multiple layers, timelines, inscriptions and tell a story of the multiplicity of objects. A performance can highlight the affordances and histories embedded in recording technologies, audio processing and selection, playback and performance tools, and the venue itself. In this performance, I experiment with all of these, attempting to create an affective space for audiences to attune to unheard sounds and sociomaterial relationships.

Performance elements

Photo credit: UiO Energy and Environment, 2025

Creating a hybrid instrument. The Error Instruments Flowerfield drone synthesizer produces a deep bass rumble to open the performance. Connecting the synth via cables to plant leaves makes the plant part of the synth circuit and changes the sound. We are not hearing the sound of the plant. We are hearing the hybrid interaction of plant, technology, and body. The sounds produced are not tuned to a scale, I improvise and respond to changes in sound that are different with every performance, with every plant.

Playing electromagnetic fields. The Playtronica Biotron is another form of hybrid instrument. But this time, instead of the plant becoming part of the circuit, the Biotron measures the electrical field generated by the plant and translates that into notes played through an iPad instrument. By moving my hands near, around, and touching the plant leaves, I play the electromagnetic field like a theremin. Movements through the air are not precise like playing the keys of a piano. The shifting field of the plant is something I interact with and respond to, controlling while not in control.

There is no separation. Human voices enter with my collaborator Erbse reading a poem I wrote: ‘There is no separation’. Reminding us that there is no separation between humans and nature, we breathe together, we dance together. The text describes the long-standing separation of humans and environments through poetry. Rather than academic text, the poem describes a different type of relationship that is possible in a form that is accessible yet mysterious, walking the line between the arts and science

Hearing the sounds of technology. The power supplies, instruments, iPad, and mixer all generate electromagnetic noise. Using the Soma Synths Ether, this normally hidden background radiation becomes audible. Revealing the energy and material that goes into making these instruments and sounds possible. The equipment is powered by the same hydro dams that are the subject and content of the performance – a nested loop of materiality and sound.

Beats and echoes. Broken rhythms and mangled voices enter, driving the piece forward with a beat that is disrupted and not quite regular, voices that contain bits of text but are not quite audible. Water also follows a rhythm with annual floods and dry seasons, yet hydropower disrupts these rhythms constraining flows and remapping landscapes. Rhythms we are used to in the past, like Spring floods in Norway, are being disrupted by climate change. Floods in the Fall are now bigger than in the Spring – the past is no longer a reliable guide to the future.

Hearing the infrasonic and ultrasonic. Layered under the live sounds are recordings of the infrasonic vibrations (below the range of human hearing) and ultrasonic noise (frequencies above the human ear) from the Hammeren power station. The sounds that humans cannot hear, mediated through technology, translated into the audible. Audiences gain access to previously inaudible sounds. Yet these sounds have been translated into the range of human hearing so we can perceive them. What is lost and gained in these translations?

Water flows. Sounds of water enter, recorded at the spillways of the Vamma power station, the sounds of the river rushing over the dam and rocks, balancing the river flow when the turbine is shut down. Responding to frequency balancing market signals and electrical grid failures. We are hearing the sound of money, of markets, of interconnected and overlapping regimes of control.

Playing the building. The Tremor Labs Xeophón sitting on the floor captures low frequency sounds and vibrations. I kick and stomp the floor, playing the building like a drum. The sounds echo and feedback through the speakers in ways that are barely controllable. The geophone reveals the sounds of the infrasonic, yet the performance conceals the legacies of the very same technology that was developed for military use and nuclear testing

What’s next?

I am now in the process of analysing hours and days of field recordings from Vamma and Hammeren. In collaboration with Tatiana Grandon, Andrea Nightingale, and Kyle Devine, we are also conducting interviews from power station operators at Hafslund Kraft, people hiking by the stations, and energy system actors like Nordpool (managing the electricity market) and Elvia (operating transmission and distribution lines). Publications are underway including a review of the many uses of sound in hydropower and potentials for further research, the role of sound in revealing and understanding uncertainty, and examining the spatial configurations of risk in Norway’s participation in frequency control and restoration markets, tracing how risks are produced and lived across bodies, infrastructures, and places. In collaboration with members of the ERC Advance UNRULY project, I am developing more ways of engaging with sounds such as situated listening workshops where participants can listen to hydropower across the audio spectrum and geotagged self-guided soundwalks where anyone with a mobile phone can hear recordings from underwater to underground to inside the turbine shafts. These will be tested in Norway and Nepal in 2026.