Listening and Sounding Tambay
- Written byCreative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP)
- Published date 01 October 2026
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Awakening Score
Sit back-to-back with someone or something
Listen to the city awaken for 15 minutes
Repeat at the same time each morning for seven days
In July 2026, CRiSAP Members and PhD students continued a yearlong collaboration with researchers from the University of the Philippines, University of Hong Kong and The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Rooted in curator Dayang Yraola's writing on the Filipino term “tambay” as a form of everyday social gathering, participants experimented with ways of listening and sounding the city through text scores and improvisation.
Building on CRiSAP’s 2025 trip to the Philippines, participants led research experiments in parks, homes, trains and other transient spaces, responding to the rhythms and itinerant nature of a city in motion.
Each contributor delivered a workshop (score, guide, instruction etc) that encouraged forms of sonic tambay in public spaces, alone or together, with or without words. Cultural visits, workshops and events were also mixed in with daily activities over seven days.
Highlights included:
- An improvisation workshop in LCC hosted by David Toop (CRiSAP Professor Emeritus) and Ania Psenitsnikova, in collaboration with Scoring Warnings, an Arts and Humanities research project that mobilises artistic practices to interrogate instructional modes of address in disaster preparedness (featuring CRiSAP Members Irene Revell and Amina Abbas-Nazari).
- LCC archivist, Erin Liu led a tour through the Her Noise Archive. This collection is embedded into the MA Sound Arts course with students making work in response to the archive during their studies.
- CRiSAP PhD student Nicol Parkinson led a tour of the London Musicians Collective archive. Nicol’s PhD “Butlers Wharf and the London Musicians Collective: Sounding Strategies in time-based art in London, 1970-1988” traces a unified history of sound in the development of performance art and performance in the development of sound art, as they emerged in the latter twentieth century. Listen to a CRiSAP Resonance Extra episode that features Nicol’s research.
- Continuing the archival emphasis and exploration of documentation as a form of production, curator Andrea Zarza gave an in-depth overview of the British Library Sound Archive with a specific focus on the artistic residencies that have taken place in the library over recent years.
The research residencies between the Philippines and London have been supported by the LCC International Office and British Council. In total, four CRiSAP PhD students have been involved directly in all activities.
Over the coming year the team will scope materials for publishing including the potential production of a radio essay about research residencies.
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