Pauline Gouablin & Mélia Roger
Sound Artist ; Photographer
Spring 2027
- Music
- San Francisco
“Together, we have imagined and are currently working on a multi-facet sound-photography object: an Atlas of DIY Field recording practices. This Atlas, currently under construction, takes the shape of an art book and a vinyl.”
We are a duo of sound artist and photographer, experimenting around DIY practices in the field recording community. We met in 2016 at the ENS Louis Lumière (France) and have been developing our own artistic practice since. The Atlas of Muddy listening (art book + vinyl, in production with Enceladus Press) is our first collective project, born from our common desire to explore the contemporary ways of listening to the living worlds.
Mélia Roger is part of a large community of audionaturalists and has been witnessing an incredible archive of Do It Yourself (DIY) practices to record and listen to environmental soundscapes, collecting sounds and testimonies of how we listen to our changing landscapes. Pauline Gouablin comes from documentary photography and has been exploring the musical DIY scene with her analog camera since 2018. Together, we have imagined and are currently working on a multi-facet sound-photography object: an Atlas of DIY Field recording practices. This Atlas, currently under construction, takes the shape of an art book and a vinyl and will be published by Enceladus Press and distributed by the MIT Press. It investigates who is listening to the soundscapes today, and how? How are those recordings and listening communities shaping a global sense of empathic listening? This photographic and sonic research started in 2025 in Europe via the members of various associations like Sonatura in France and the Wildlife Sound Recording Society based in the UK, and is now aiming for a wider survey.
Mélia Roger (1996) is an audionaut, whose work focuses on environmental and empathic listening. Trained in sound engineering and transdisciplinary studies (ENS Louis-Lumière, Paris; ZHdK, Zurich), she works across immersive spatial formats, naturalistic field practices and is finishing a practice-based PhD at the University of Lille (together with Le Fresnoy) on the relationship between sound art and acoustic ecology.
Pauline Gouablin (1992) is an artist and photographer based in Paris. Her practice is shaped through encounters, focusing on people who think and make. She works with small, affordable analog cameras she can carry anywhere, adopting a sensitive and intimate approach.
After an open call for DIY set ups for field recording where we received over 90 propositions from all continents, we want to deepen our explorations to a broader territory: we want to immerse ourselves in California and extend our relations with the heritage of soundscape listening. We want to encounter the local DIY communities that are emerging from those ear-centered practices, especially in this vulnerable landscape, largely transformed by wildfires.
Together with Joel Wanek at Berkeley University (Geography Department), we want to re-imagining ways to empower people with DIY contact microphones and hydrophones to listen to these vulnerable environments. Beyond a documentary approach, this collaboration is aiming to offer an artistic position, creating an incredibly rich exchange of methodologies and scores of radical environmental listening.
By co-organizing DIY workshops and field recording trips with local sound artists, Pauline Gouablin will construct a visual typology of tools—objects generally destined to remain unseen — forming a living inventory that traces modes of making, conditions of use, and the landscapes shaped by these practices. From the sonic perspective, the field recordings of Mélia Roger, embedded together with interviews and recordings collected from listening communities in California, will be the core of the vinyl.
These two sound and visual approaches work both separately and together, engaging in a dialogue about capturing the gestures of listening.
The workshops will be held at the University of Berkeley, together with Joel Wanek in the Geography Department. We will conduct ateliers of DIY contact microphones, hydrophones and other stereo electret set ups to explore the soundscapes of the Francisco Bay with his students and local sound communities. We will learn and discuss the political possibilities of sound, listening to different archives from their previous sessions and our own photographic and sonic practice from France. Besides these shared moments, we will conduct field recording explorations in the state of California, where Bernie Krause has been listening and recording for the past 50 years. This state has a large history of soundscape listening and we want to make comparisons between the current sonic states of these places and the sonic archive of Bernie Krause, now shared with La Fondation Cartier in Paris. How to continue to listen to this landscape today? How to actualize this archive with contemporary recordings? How to “map” and document those listening gestures? These two sound and visual approaches work both separately and together, engaging in a dialogue about capturing the gestures of listening.
In partnership with
Enceladus Press
Enceladus Press is a publishing house based in New York and Paris, dedicated to aesthetics, contemporary art, and philosophy, publishing works at the intersection of academic research and artistic practice. Its titles are distributed by MIT Press.
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a leading public research university founded in 1868 and located in the San Francisco Bay Area. It offers more than 300 degree programs across 15 schools and colleges and is renowned for its research excellence and interdisciplinary approach.