Fragments, an acousmatic piece for air raid sirens and voices

Fragments (2026) is a fixed-media sound work that advances an ongoing research trajectory on soundscape, listening, and the formation of shared sonic environments. The work was commissioned by Mili Romano as part of a collective sonic action against war and broadcast on Radio Città Fujiko (Bologna, 5 April 2026), situating the piece within a public and participatory artistic context.

The research enquiry addresses how listening operates as an ethical, situated, and environmentally embedded practice within conditions shaped by conflict, and how sonic environments can sustain attention, relationality, and vulnerability across distributed sources. This enquiry develops across a compositional trajectory including The Hyperdrone #1 (2015), The Hyperdrone #2 (2020), and Méiyǒu shālù (2023), which collectively examine peace, soundscape, and perceptual attention as interconnected fields.

Methodologically, the work mobilises environmental recordings and constructed sonic material as co-present agents within a shared sonic field. Soundscapes associated with conflict, including air raid sirens and distant artillery, are interwoven with multilingual vocal fragments gathered for the work. These materials are organised through layering, temporal displacement, and sustained incompleteness, producing a dynamic listening environment in which sonic events emerge, recede, and interact across shifting proximities.

Fragments makes a clear contribution to sound-based research by establishing a compositional framework in which sound functions as an ecological and relational medium, shaping inhabitable environments rather than discrete objects. The work aim to show how listening can be configured as a mode of engagement that remains attentive under conditions of saturation and repetition, addressing the normalisation of conflict through sustained tension, partiality, and perceptual openness.

Through this approach, the work contributes to a technoecological understanding of sound practice, in which environmental recordings, mediated signals, and human voices operate within interconnected systems of perception and meaning. The collaboration with Mili Romano situates this framework within a broader field of public and participatory artistic practice, extending compositional research into collective and site-sensitive contexts.

Podcast of the live broadcast is available here: https://coxospaziale.blogspot.com/2026/05/coxo-spaziale-573-roberta-cavallari-e.html

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