ER!
April 2026 - March 2027
İstanbul
ER! is a project that explores the auditory ecology of the emergency department and the listening practices developed by healthcare workers within this dense and intense sonic environment, drawing on sound ethnography and artistic research.
Based on fieldwork conducted in the emergency department of a public hospital in İstanbul, the project focuses on the role of sound in medical knowledge and decision-making processes through field recordings, observation, and interviews with healthcare workers.
In the emergency department, heart monitors, ventilators, alarm systems, and other medical devices continuously translate bodily and physiological processes into sound. Yet these sounds do not necessarily carry the same meaning in every situation. Within a dense and often chaotic sonic environment, healthcare workers learn to distinguish, prioritise, and interpret particular signals. ER! approaches listening not merely as a sensory mode based on hearing, but as a context-specific, embodied practice of knowledge production acquired through experience.
The sounds and narratives gathered through the field research are reworked through electroacoustic composition and performance. Using techniques such as layering, temporal and spectral expansion, resynthesis, and spatialisation, the hospital’s sonic environment is reconstructed in different ways. In doing so, the project aims to make audible the relationship between the sounds produced by medical technologies and human listening practices.
