Elif Gülin Soğuksu is an electroacoustic composer, sound artist, performer, and researcher born in Istanbul and currently based in Berlin. She obtained her master’s degree at the Institute of Sonology in the Hague. Elif draws inspiration from the fugitive behavior and cross-modality of imagination in sound; her compositional practice grounds on catching the sounds of the mind. She researches essentially on the human voice as a potent force in the formation of mentally produced sounds.
Her electroacoustic pieces and live performances bridge algorithmic approaches, including voice-driven live electronics and creative coding, digital processing, and spatial sound. She traces the peripheries of sensorial and perceptual currencies of voice, auditory hallucinations, and the tactile nature of sound.
She released her latest album 𝘦𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘮𝘺 𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘴 𝘰𝘳 on Riforma, and her debut EP on Søvn Records. She works as a sound designer for multidisciplinary projects and as a sound engineer and technician for live concerts. Her recent residencies include *Topia Festival (DE), Kintai.Kitaip (LT), Sound Topographies GMEA Albi (FR), Elektronmusikstudion EMS Stockholm (SE), NOPA sonic arts festival in Yerevan (AM) among others. She had internships at Subtext Recordings with James Ginzburg and at MONOM, spæsLab, Errant Sound in Berlin. She is affiliated as a curatorial partner for the Listening Biennial in Istanbul.
Questions and Answers:
3 FACTS
1: “We hear (and listen) not only with the ears but also with the body, and in particular it is sensations of the mouth, throat, and voice of another that, as listeners, we often mimic and re-create in our own.” Miriama Young
2: Our hearing is more prone to illusion because hearing mechanism involves a remarkably small amount of neural tissue compared to our visual system.
3: Instead of raising questions about what the notion of voice is, what it symbolizes, and what it represents, we should lend our ears to the affordances of the voice beyond symbolic attributes: what it does to us.
11 Questions
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
My source of inspiration is an amalgam of feelings, experiences, imagination, and philosophical concepts. From existential questions to the books I read, from conversations with dear friends to the music I listen to and dig into, from the universe to humans. I’m especially inspired by how human perception works in listening; I’m very fascinated by the intersubjectivity of our listening experience as well as the common affective and perceptual currencies. I must say that imagination plays a big role in this too; I’m a person with a very active inner world.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
It goes so far back that I don’t even remember how I started making music. I was very little. One thing I know is that even back then I was very fascinated by using the voice. I was recording my voice on a tape recorder and sing. I always had a notebook full of lyrics for the songs I wrote when I was a kid. Besides voice, my first musical education started at the age of 6 when I started taking classical guitar lessons.
3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time? (yes we know it is difficult).
Indeed very difficult, I tried to select different types of favourite albums.
– Burnout / Anatomy of Three Velocities – Seth Scott
– An Index of Metals – Fausto Romitelli
– Moto Perpetuo – Kilchhofer Anklin
– HAVE A NICE LIFE – The Unnatural World
– Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea – PJ Harvey
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
A place where I tasted freedom for the first time in my life. Although the concept of freedom is very subjective, coming from a very oppressed and politically corrupted country, especially as a woman, I had a lot of challenges just to exist in the public space, and society.
5. What’s your favourite place in your town?
I think it is Tempelhof, I will never forget how I felt the first time I accidentally discovered that place.
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
I would do something with somatic practices, I believe, I would work with my own and others’ bodies. I would swing in between being a performer and using somatic practices as a therapeutic experience.
7. What was the last record/music you bought or listened to?
Orient Expressions – Divan, a very rare record found in a record store in Istanbul. It is from 2004, a blend of Turkish/Alevi folk, oriental music and downtempo/electronic music, and breakbeats.
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
I’m very open to collaborate with anyone with whom I can resonate and create a shared space for creation. However, these days I’m very excited about a performance/album collaboration with Tout Casser, with whom we came up with a genre called EDR (emo digital romance). On the other hand, I’m also very excited about collaborating with my friends in Berlin with whom we created a community space called *path/SArfldr (Sonic Agency Resource Folder) It is also a digital archive managed by an IRL/URL community of people engaged in the sonic matter as listeners and experimental sound practitioners based or semi-based in Berlin.
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
As a performer, it was 2024; I was having a residency in a small town in Lithuania called Kintai. I had a performance in a beautiful church. The performance was a site-specific work created for eight speakers set up in an acousmonium arrangement within the Kintai church. It investigated the physical aspects of the space and the tactile nature of sound. We were interplaying with the reflections, surfaces, and resonance points through speaker placements. It was beyond magical.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
The term “technology” comes from the Greek words *”techne,”* meaning art, craft, skill, or making, and “logos,” meaning reason, knowledge, or study. Technology is not only limited to machines, AI, and computers, but in a broader sense, as Marlene Schafer says, it is something that can be put to use in order to harness specific effects. It is not simply an object but a means of mediation. According to anthropologist Alfred Gell, the concept of art is a technology of enchantment itself. For me as well, sound-making can be seen as a technology where it is used to affect people, shape perceptions, provoke emotions, and resonate. I, of course, do use tools, machines, software, and coding in my creative process, but technology is not only limited to these material objects that produce a product. I guess I’m more interested in its effects on the human, society, perception, and the world.
11. What can we expect from your concert at Kiezsalon in Berlin?
From electroacoustic gestures to live coding through SuperCollider, from dark, ethereal ambient and discrete to organic sonic textures and a harmonic field. My concert will interplay with different dimensions of the space, from architectural to emotional, from bodily space to hallucinatory. It will delve into the realm of sonic imagination and affective currencies of the voice—a space where internal and external listening coalesce into a musical creation, where hearing voices makes us attentive to a level of intimacy—listeners respond viscerally to the human voice. Voice plays a central yet fluid role, appearing as a material, metaphor, and hallucinatory element. Synthesized sounds, field recordings, micro sounds—electronic clicks, impulses, and discrete sounds—and ethereal voices and harmonies traverse the surfaces, colliding into the texture, density, and sparseness of the space.
