BONES

BONES
Sound Installation

Produced with The Making Space and The Media Centre
Installation: Transducers and Ready Made materials
Presente in The Media Centre, Huddersfield
January 6th-27th 2023
Thanks to Andrew Wilson, Lina Velandia, and Vernon O’Reilly


BONES is a project by David Vélez (Col/UK), exploring the resonance of human skulls to enhance Otherness and subvert listening biases in sonic art. BONES presents the auditory with unfamiliar audible experiences encouraging new sensibilities that challenge how we perceive our bodies through sound.

The sensibility of our bones to sound is crucial at an early stage of our life when in the womb, we have an initial encounter with the Otherness of our mother. We listen to her voice for the first time through the mastoid bones of our skull using the spinal cord like an antenna. This event is crucial in the baby’s cognitive and sensory development as it will influence the relationship they will establish with their affective environment.

BONES produces artworks that evoke our first sonic memories as babies, creating immersive experiences that provide the listeners with comfort. These installations challenge the cultural preconception that sound exclusively propagates airborne and that our ears are the only part of our body capable of detecting sound. BONES employs transducers designed to propagate sonic vibration through the skeletal system. Transducers are electroacoustic devices projecting sound through any solid or liquid material. In these pieces, transduction opens the door to unheard sonic experiences arousing the vulnerability of our skulls to sound.

BONES invites the spectators to establish tactile contact with its pieces, creating warm and vibrating synergies. Moreover, the implementation of transducers and their relatively quiet sounds to the ear encourage harmonic relations between the artworks and the individuals that unwind, socialize and work in public areas. It means a shift from the often-imposing chara