IWTS25 Theme: WAVES

The 2025 ISTW focuses on the topic of “waves”, exploring its analytical potential for the study of music and sound in the (Eastern) Mediterranean and across their transnational trajectories and resonances. 

The wave, a performative materiality enacting sound’s reproductions, transmissions, diffractions, dispersions, vibrations, interferences, velocities,  echoes,  periodicities, frequencies  and oscillations. 

A haptic sonic movement inhabiting, and potentially occupying, circulating and distributed among bodies. One mediating emotions, themselves often felt as moving and cumulating in waves (waves of sorrow, love, fear…) constituting, permeating, aligning, and transforming bodies. Waves and fluctuations of emotions variously registered and played in music, mouthed and voiced in song, too. 

A plurality – waves – infinitely becoming across restless choreographies, forming transient assemblages conditioned and arranged by the marine weather-world. Assemblages resonating their own lexicon of sounds and timbres, a lexicon also accommodating the ghostly auralities and silenced underwater cosmos hidden underneath.

A seemingly boundless watery space in motion dictating the limits of livelihood and death in the sea (as in the case of slavery and refugee necropolitics, for instance), producing audible geographies and their economies of perception, diverse strategies of dwelling and navigation, crafting the city-ports’ and islands’ soundworlds and horizons.

Waves defining marine citizenships and their sonic imaginations, seafaring, migrations and forced dislocations, trade routes, stories by travellers and explorers, scientific expeditions, “blue” economies and extractivisms, landscapes of colonization and war.

A dual metaphor, one one hand, for change, shifting aesthetic, social and political movements and their intricate resoundings, on the other, a metaphor for iteration, rhythmicity and periodicity. 

Waves featuring communication and technological transmission, as is the case with radio fields among other sound technologies, regulating social practices, techniques of listening and spatial imaginaries at once reverberating locality and playfully remapping its range of spectralities.

The waves of architectural acoustics determining ways of inhabiting built environments (for worship, work, education, leisure, for institutional and residential spaces) and shaping their acoustic experiences as well as, their sometimes hegemonically moderated limitations. 

The wave: the discursively elusive, indeterminate and apparently untranslatable, yet tactile and felt, object of ethnographic, historical and (ethno)musicological research. How do we write waves and how do we write of waves? 

Waves of thought pointing to the liquidity of our theoretical imagination and foregrounding the possibilities of “thinking with waves”: a theory-navigating process open to re-configuration, relationality, resynthesis and re-learning, a sort of restless theory-making attuned to a ceaselessly becoming world.

The workshop is aligned with the sound festival organized by MOMus Experimental Centre for the Arts in January 2026. The festival also focuses on the topic of “wwwwavessss”  and will host projects designed in the context of the IWTS workshop.