How do we relate to ordinary stones and their sounding language? What is their voice or breath, and can it be approached through human listening and voicing? Can we relate to their resonant agency?

Lucie Páchová’s research project explores stones as resonant bodies, listening agents, and carriers of geological memory and more-than-human forms of knowledge. It unfolds through binaural sound recording, vocal experimentation, contact microphone techniques, and the construction of lithophonic sound objects. She departs from the resonant qualities of phonolites collected in the volcanic landscapes of Northern Bohemia, pebbles gathered along the Red Sea, the Finnish coastline, and stones casually encountered around Brussels. These materials become both instruments and active collaborators in expanded listening practice.

Using multiple binaural microphone setups distributed throughout the space, intimate “in-ear” listening situations are created in which the perception of scale becomes unstable and unpredictable: microscopic textures begin to resemble vast landscapes, while the listener is gradually drawn into a suspended sense of “stone” time. Through detailed contact recordings, subtle frictions, internal vibrations, erosion-like textures, and hidden resonances emerge at the threshold of audibility, becoming intimate through headphones.

The concept further explores the possibility of transposing the acoustic behaviour of stones into the human voice. Vocal techniques inspired by resonance, friction, vibration, porosity, and density attempt to approach a speculative “language of stones” as a process of embodied attunement and acoustic mimicry. Her voice becomes a porous material through which mineral textures and weight may resonate.

DIY lithophonic instruments, activated by physical force, small motors, contact loudspeakers, or vocal vibration, will be distributed throughout the installation space together with binaural microphones, creating an imaginary ecology of resonating bodies communicating across space.

The resulting performance (if possible) proposes listening not as distant observation, but as immersion inside the material and the materialised voice itself.

Lucie Páchová is a Czech sound artist, musician, and composer. Her work is grounded in listening to and observing spaces, environments, and the relationships between their human and more-than-human agents. She approaches sound as a relational and physical experience, explored through embodied practices within collective and community contexts. Voice, body, everyday situations, soundwalks, field recordings, and attentive listening to landscapes, objects, people, and distant environments form recurring impulses in her work. These take shape as sound collages, multichannel installations, chamber compositions, improvised situations, and solo performances. Musically, she is particularly active in her authorial ensemble Talaqpo, where voice serves as her primary instrument. As part of her doctoral research, she focuses on collective listening and improvisation within educational contexts. luciepachova.com