"Queer Sonic Fingerprint"-Listening to speculative queer relations in ethnographic collections

Queer Sonic Fingerprint is the multimodal result of a collaboration between anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker and sound artist Adam Pultz Melbye. Our work embarked from the question of how the sonic as a register of making and experiencing can inform queer relations in the context of ethnographic collections. You are listening to audio recorded during a sound installation at Art Laboratory Berlin on November 4, 2024 (120 min, assembled from a take of 4 h). The installation features sounds of artifacts in private possession and from ethnographic collections in different European museums. These have been created with a recording technique that generates a short sound called an impulse response. The sound of an impulse response is reminiscent of striking or knocking on a material body (think of drumming, a door knock, or a woodpecker). Through this process, the acoustic properties of the object's body become audible. In other words, if you knock on wood, the wood has a particular “wood” sound. If you knock on metal, so does the metal. Those sounds are defined by the specific shape and material constitution of the body from which they derive. A metal sheet, for example, will sound different to a metal tube. In addition, you are hearing bits of ambient recordings from exhibition spaces and storages at ethnological museums. You are also hearing recorded bits of conversations with curators of those collections and with people (a mix of artists and researchers) who have been part of the research process. Some of these recordings are filtered, which means that they will sound different from the original recording. This is because the recording is being played back through one of the impulse responses. In a sense, you are therefore hearing these recordings from the perspective of an artifact. You can listen to the recording here (streaming in website): https://rs.cms.hu-berlin.de/tfj/plugins/api_resource/?ref=5&k=06f07871e5. A catalogue of 45 different artifacts comprises the sonic ancestors of the sounds heard in the installation. To produce these recordings, we had to get physical access to collections. This is not easy, as such work may only be conducted in coordination with, and under the watch of a curator, possibly also a conservator. Hence, accessing collections and explaining the project to curators were a major task in the production of our work. Another challenge was the fact that we had to touch and vibrate artifacts to record them—something that sparked many questions and concerns about the integrity of the artifacts. After we developed an interface for the recording (Melbye, 2025b) that allowed us to instantly listen back to the impulse response, we experienced that curators and conservators were happy to engage in listening, often expressing surprise at the sounds revealed through the recording process. How does one, for instance, imagine the condensed resonant identity of a glass of cola nuts? How about the sound of a turtle shell or a teapot (see Figures 1-3)? To generate an impulse response (the percussive sounds you are hearing), we have used what is called the swept sine method. For this, we place a contact speaker and a contact microphone on an object (see Figures 4 and 5). Through the contact speaker, we play a sine wave, the frequency of which travels from 20 to 20,000 Hz (the approximate range of human hearing) over several seconds. The contact microphone records how the sine wave sweep sounds through the artifact. Due to the artifact's shape and material, this will sound different from the original sine wave sweep. For example, a large gong would resonate for a long time at specific frequencies, while a soft object like a fabric doll would mostly reproduce low frequencies and sound acoustically quite “dead.” Now we have two recordings: the original “pure” sine wave sweep, and the sweep as heard through the artifact. We then remove the original sine wave sweep from the recording of the object. This leaves us with a representation of just the acoustic fingerprint of that object, or what is called the Frequency Response. Finally, we perform what is called an inverse fast fourier transform on the frequency response, which produces the impulse responses you are hearing. For a more detailed discussion of this process, see Adam's work on producing the installation Kin (Melbye, 2025a). We started our collaborative conversation in early 2022. Isabel was about to embark on a research project, situated at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, that would investigate what queer methods around ethnographic collections could be. In a paper on queering ethnographic collections (Bredenbröker, 2024), Isabel engages with this question in depth. There are two takeaway points from the paper which proved relevant for our collaborative work. Firstly, queer methods are yet to be successfully applied in the context of ethnographic collections. While they are more present in museum contexts that already include queer positions, ethnographic collections are at the very start of such a possible process. Secondly, kin relations became a central theme of our thought process. More precisely, we addressed the question of how non-normative forms of kinship may be found and created in collection contexts. Here, we embarked from Alfred Gell's art nexus model, which posits non-authoritative relationality at the center of art works. Isabel had previously worked with field recording while Adam's PhD (Melbye, 2023) involved an auto-ethnography of instrument building and performance practice. Combined, this laid the foundation for an interdisciplinary multimodal work that engages with sound. We worked with interview, conversation and location recordings from museum spaces. In addition, Adam created a bespoke genetic algorithm. This software would become our collaborator for sonically amplifying possible queer kin relations between collection artifacts and their speculative descendants. In a time where the indiscriminate and uncritical use of AI and machine learning has become ubiquitous, we seized the opportunity to direct a critical gaze at the field of autonomous algorithms. Genetic algorithms were primarily conceived to optimize software and hardware by evolving solutions through a simplified digital model of Darwinian evolution. Subverting the problematic neoliberal notions of survival-of-the-fittest baked into much evolutionary computing, we instead focused on co-adaption, open-ended exploration, and sonic diversity. Queer and feminist notions of kinship were central to this project. They afforded a critique of the norms and biases inherent in evolutionary computing and artificial life. They also allowed for a creative reassessment of these computational methods. Adam's programming work1 was inspired by Stefan Helmreich's ethnography of Artificial Life research at the Santa Fe Institute in the 1990s (2000). Helmreich reads Neo-Darwinist attitudes of his interlocutors against an understanding of kinship that transcends biogenetic relations. The result is an evolving digital-physical ecosystem in which individual sounds enter into non-normative kin-relations (Butler, 2012, 2022) as well as symbiogenetic relationships (Margulis, 2008). Genetic and evolutionary algorithms model biological evolution on a computer, as explained in Adam's work on the topic (Melbye, 2025a). Often, evolutionary algorithms use recombination through crossover as well as mutation on bit-strings or code (representing genomes), to produce new bit-strings or lines of code. If the goal, for example, is to make more efficient code, the algorithm selects the new lines of code that have the smallest size or use less memory and CPU. It then lets them recombine and mutate to produce new generations of increasingly efficient code. Obviously, evolutionary algorithms represent a reductionist model of evolution and lack many of the important processes that characterize “wet” evolution (the kind that include bodily fluids, social interaction, culture and all the other things that make life worth living). Instead of bit-strings, we use sound as the genome at the core of our evolutionary algorithm. These sounds meet other sounds and make kin by exchanging properties. The new sounds then occasionally undergo mutations: some frequencies disappear, or new ones appear. In contrast to many traditional genetic algorithms, the sounds in our implementation also undergo other evolutionary processes, some inspired by biology, some speculative. For example, new sounds may have three parents rather than two, or they may steal genes (frequency information) from the acoustic environment, such as people talking in the exhibition space and cars on the street. The installation (curated by Tuçe Erel) as it was presented at Art Laboratory Berlin in late 2024 included a set of wooden archival boxes with motion sensors, containing catalogue cards and images of artifacts recorded (see Figures 6 and 7). Sounds played through six speakers. A workstation allowed visitors to listen to individual sounds of artifacts and contribute to our open catalogue (see Figure 8), possibly adding information, questions, and thoughts on featured artifacts. A research station with files for each artifact offered additional information. Open 3 days per week for 4 h per day, the recording chosen here is a 2-h edited version of the installation as it sounded on 3 November. During that day, about 12,000 individual impulse responses distributed across approximately 180 generations lived through several life stages to finally reach a ghostly existence from which they could become reborn. This setup cut across different modes of visitor engagement and allowed for a sonic ecology to unfold that sounded different on each day of the installation (see Figure 9). You can watch a short video documenting the installation here: https://vimeo.com/1079346884. We would like to thank Mareike Späth (Hanover State Museum), Albrecht Wiedman and Andrea Scholz (Ethnologisches Museum Berlin), Elisabeth Heyne (Berlin Natural History Museum), Birgit Meyer, Godson Atsu Sokpor and Rita Amaral (Pressing Matters, Utrecht University), and Annette Schmidt (Wereldmuseum Leiden). A special thank you to Tuçe Erel, Regine Rapp, and Christian de Lutz at Art Laboratory Berlin. Many thanks to David Pirró, Luc Döbereiner, Leonie Strecker, and Ji Youn Kang of the Speculative Sound Synthesis project at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. We would like to acknowledge funding by the DFG German Research Foundation (Gepris no. 497230234), Koda Kultur and Sound Art Lab. Isabel is grateful to have been a fellow of the DAAD program TheMuseumsLab 2024. Finally, we would also like to give thanks to all the beings, powers, and presences that were and are in the vicinity of this sonic ecology, in ways recognized and unrecognized. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. All work in ethnographic collections was informed by conversations with curators about the ethical appropriateness of engaging with artifacts. This included considerations of indigenous intellectual property, sacred functions, and cultural belonging statuses of artifacts. We have chosen to engage with artifacts where no conflict of interest could be identified to the best of our own and the curator's knowledge. We are aware that this knowledge may not be comprehensive. The audio file of Queer Sonic Fingerprint includes bits of conversation in different languages. These have been chosen by the algorithm at random from a pool of material. The content of these bits of conversation is not transcribed as many of the original recordings have been filtered. This has changed the overall sound and intelligibility of the content. Conceptually, this is intentional and explained in the ethnographic statement. Code that informed this work, specifically the recording process and the genetic algorithm, is freely available as open-source code on GitHub. Links are integrated in the text. A publicly accessible shorter version of this piece is hosted by Cashmere Radio, including a 15-min artist conversation: https://cashmereradio.com/episode/cashmere-specials-queer-sonic-fingerprint-w-isabel-bredenbroker-and-adam-pultz/.

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