Audio compositions

We Are Shivered

About: We Are Shivered 2025

I wanted to make a sound piece about sound itself, and how it is perceived differently from others’ cultural perspectives, and also from the perspective of an endangered world , a shared world, of creatures and climate catastrophe, wars, extinctions and genocides. Sound is a form of intimate connection, compared to seeing, it is closer to touching and can therefore create a deeper empathy and sense of embodiment. Hearing and communicating via sounds is also a form of conceptual framing of the world, that allows us to understand it differently, if we pay closer attention to our sonic worlds.

Sound is energy vibration, manifested at different wavelengths. Infrasound, a sound transmission at frequencies below 20 hz, cannot consciously be heard, but can be felt. It can travel huge distances unmediated, far across the globe, via the earth, rocks, sky and sea. Some types of infrasound are used by animals, birds, whales, for communication. But insidiously harmful infrasound is generated by bombs, windfarms, military sonar, rocket launches, sonic booms, sonic weapons, shipping. Infrasound is a frequency that can harm the bodies of living creatures, even if we cannot hear it, and various kinds of infrasound are destroying life-worlds, and affecting bodies/minds. We are caught up in such a fiercely visual world, that we are not ‘listening’. Historically genocides have involved replacing indigenous sound worlds with the sounds of so-called progress, that drowns out indigenous sounds, and destroys the sounds of the living world from which they drew their cultural, aesthetic, spiritual and agricultural knowledge, and their sustainable food sources. Extinctions and genocides were from more than direct killing.

Infrasound in this piece is a metaphor for how we are profoundly affected by our sonic environments, and how we are affecting others. A metaphor for our interconnectedness. We are all inseparable from the other creatures, and peoples, with whom we share the planet. We are all vibrating, ‘sounding’ and shivering together. Sound binds us more deeply than we realise. We are all in this together. This time of mass extinctions and erasures - plant, animal and human life/ sound worlds, and conceptual and cultural worlds, are all being lost at a faster rate than ever before. Past events and extinctions can be comprehended sonically. Listening closely to changes in our sound worlds can give us information on how to better understand what is happening in our world in the present. Reverberations are consequences of our actions. Archaeo-acoustics explores relationships between lost sounds / human culture and the past - how people perceived, used and created sound environments. Realising the profound loss of sound worlds of the past can help us comprehend in what ways we are destroying seen and unseen worlds in our present moment.

Can sound shiver us enough into action?

Credits:

Sounds of war and bombs falling in Gaza recorded and mixed by Mohamed Yaghi - the Sound Man of Gaza.

Sounds of rock gongs played in the Karoo by archeo acoustic archaeologist and researcher Neil Rusch at ATEM, Archaeological TransfrontiEr Music, School of Geography, Archeology & Environmental Studies at the University of Witwatersrand South Africa and inspiration from his essay Sounds and sound thinking in |xam-ka !au: “These are those to which I am listening with all my ears”

A contemporary San man from the Kalahari in Namibia, speaking an endangered  Khoisan language ( /xam is also a Khoisan language, that used click-consonants, but it is extinct due to colonisation and genocide). He is talking about the different grasses growing there, and their uses and indigenous knowledge.

The voice of a Cuvier’s beaked whale echolocating for food, in some of the deepest parts of the ocean, often mistaking sinking plastic bags filled with liquid for squid and therefore dying of starvation.

Kaluli weeping song by Kaluli of Papua New Guinea overlaid with sounds of the muni bird /Beautiful Fruit dove, whose call is considered to epitomise the sound of a lost lonely hungry child .

Palestinian music teacher and musician, singer, oud player, Mohand Al Ashram, teaching children in Gaza to sing/hum at the resonance of military surveillance drones/zannaat (an ideophonic word that means and sounds like buzzing or droning) outside the school windows and homes all day long.

Palestinian nightingale /White-spectacled Bulbul Pycnonotus xanthopygos field recording  by Manuel Grosselet in Palestine

Palestinian sunbird Cinnyris osea field recording by Marcin SoAowiej

A Palestinian folk song for the gathering and harvesting of olives by Palestinian singer, producer and neuroscientist Dalal Ghazi Muhammad Abu Amneh

A deep organ refrain played by Fraser Gartshore

Far Away Lands

About: Far Away Lands 2025

Beth and Damian meet two strange objects from somewhere far away. A voice from the deep ocean tells us more …

The Square - an extraordinary day in Cairo

About : The Square - an extraordinary day in Cairo 2025

Nesreen Nabil Hussein tells Salma about her extraordinary moment in 2011 during the Egyptian revolution. Her time in Tahrir square and feeling the strong pull to join her people there , while still in London

Salma - What’s in a name

About : Salma - What’s in a name 2025

A short piece about being a mixed Egyptian British person and the cross cultural entanglements, confusions and alienations that result from that and from my name Salma.

Film

Shell Fables ~ a Curious Cabinet of Beings & Becoming - a film created by Salma Ahmad Caller for Family Lines at the Douglas Hyde Gallery June 2022.

https://thedouglashyde.ie/family-lines-project/

Read more about Shell Fables here : https://www.salmaahmadcaller.com/shell-fables-a-curious-cabinet-of-beings-becoming

Searchlight - a short film about my parents and a moment in time in Kano, Nigeria in the late 1970s

Incantations of Veneration, Degradation and Protection for the Untamed Displaced Mis-placed Woman by Salma Ahmad Caller 2019

Please click here to watch: https://vimeo.com/366072594