Image 1: Klara du Plessis presenting at the Sound + Purpose conference. Credit: Karis Shearer
Where does research begin? Should I trace it back to earlier this year, to pre-pandemic times, to the donation of the SoundBox Collection of literary audio recordings to the AMP Lab at UBCOkanagan? I might trace a trajectory starting with the fact that the SoundBox Collection houses a 1969 reel-to-reel recording of Daphne Marlatt reading the entirety of her poetry collection leaf leaf/s, during a longer interview with Warren Tallman. Then I might gesture to Dr. Karis Shearer’s 2019 SSHRC Small Grant called “Sound Exhibitions: Feminist Approaches to Making SpokenWeb Data Public through Curation and Research Creation” which explored the possibilities of bringing sonic data from the SoundBox Collection to the public from a feminist lens. Fast-forward to 2025, as the culmination of that project Dr. Shearer and I co-curated a research-creation exhibition called Poetic Forms: Remediating Daphne Marlatt’s leaf leaf/s, installed at UBC’s Okanagan campus in May 2025. This exhibition and its focus on remediating literary audio think through permissions and copyright issues related to direct playback in the archives and was the subject of the collaborative paper we presented at the Sound + Purpose conference at Lund University in Lund, Sweden, 20-21 November 2025: “(Not) Sounding Access in the Literary Archives: Remediating Daphne Marlatt’s leaf leaf/s.” There are resonant points of contact as a research note rings out and continues to reverberate across time and outcomes.
The Sound + Purpose conference, hosted at the Sound Environment Centre at Lund University and co-organized by Drs. Phil Dodds and Sanne Krogh Groth, asked an even more fundamental question relating to research’s starting point: “Why are sounds made? What is their function? What intentions do they come with?” (Sound + Purpose conference program 3). As a brand new gathering of interdisciplinary researchers in the first year of their congregation in this form, The SOUND+ Network for Transdisciplinary Research in Sound aims to bring together international experts from a broad range of fields to consider, according to this year’s rubric, the underlying motivations for focusing on sound in their respective disciplines. The intention of articulating or resuscitating this underlying starting point was to create, again, potential resonance, to discover productive similarities or divergences across vastly differing projects and to spark the potential of future interdisciplinary collaborations.
Image 2: Slide from Kristin Aleklett Kadish’s presentation at the Sound + Purpose conference. Credit: Klara du Plessis
How can sound echo through and even work to connect disparate bodies of research? How can the purpose of sound be to share knowledge, to bridge divides, and to create new pathways for diffusive and effusive sonic research to grow together in the future? For now, the Sound + Purpose conference allowed strands of sound-related research to co-exist in ways that it would never normally be able to do when disciplines are siloed. Take Kristin Aleklett Kadish’s work on “The Soundscape of Filamentous Fungi” that investigates how fungi respond to sound and vibrations. Take Dario Galleana’s“Listening as a Purpose: Participatory Podcasting and Immersive Sound in Italy’s Internal Areas” that created a participatory space in which the audience got to relate to and re-narrate recorded oral histories. Or take Jonas Borell and Emilie Stroh’s “Sound Sounds: Human-Centered Approaches to Enhanced Alarm System Design” that studies alarm systems in industrial spaces overstimulated by sound and noise, aiming to design more resilient and more nuanced alarms. Apart from their connective interest in sound, how could fungi, oral history, and alarm systems ever resonate? The conference organizers did an excellent job of curating and grouping interdisciplinary papers into panels that underscored possible interrelations, however, purposefully bringing such a range of research together by default made for a program that felt akin to audio sampling: listening in to a melodic excerpt from one project just to segue into a vastly different, if not dissonant, methodology, bibliography, set of protocols and terms, and research aims and outcomes.
Image 3: Holger Schulze discussing the transversal at the Sound + Purpose conference. Credit: Klara du Plessis
In some ways then, the metaphor of resonance that allows research to connect and infiltrate across a variety of scholarly fields is utopian. In the final panel, Holger Schulze’s “Listening Labor and Sonic Expertise of the 2050s: An Unashamed Invocation of the Transversal Generativity in Sound Studies” encouraged embracing the speculative potential of sound across interdisciplinary fields. He suggested that de-professionalizing sound through its integration into such a vastly different range of disciplines is exactly what allows it to be innovative, to draw from different knowledge systems, to insect a series of lines and then to draw them together in ways that we cannot even guess at yet. Sound + Global, the network’s second annual conference, will be hosted at the Sound Research Centre at the University of Nottingham, U.K. next year. I ask myself how the transversal energy gleaned from this year’s gathering will resonate and connect new research presented in the future.