Professor Gascia Ouzounian
Professor Gascia Ouzounian
Gascia Ouzounian is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in Music at Lady Margaret Hall. Her research examines how sound and vibration shape cities, mediate violence, and organise relations of power.
Her first book, Stereophonica (MIT Press), traces the historical formation of spatial sound and listening from the nineteenth century to the present. Moving from early stereo technologies and experiments in binaural listening to First World War aircraft detection devices, Second World War psychoacoustics research, postwar spatial sound practices, and sound mapping, the book connects technological, artistic, and scientific histories to show how listening became a central mode of knowing, organising, and governing space.
Her forthcoming book, The Trembling City (MIT Press), advances this inquiry into the contemporary urban condition, offering a radical reinterpretation of cities as vibrational territories shaped by conflict, occupation, and mass violence. Drawing on fields including forensic architecture, critical urbanism, and sound studies—and furthering the concepts of vibrational warfare and atmospheric occupation––the book examines how sonic and vibrational forces operate as instruments of power within contemporary urban life.
Alongside these monographs, Ouzounian leads a broader research programme in sonic urbanism. She is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant project Sonorous Cities: Toward a Sonic Urbanism (SONCITIES), which brings together architects, urbanists, artists, and scholars to experiment with sonic approaches to urban analysis and design. This work includes the forthcoming volume Sonic Urbanism: A Critical Guide (Bloomsbury Academic), which explores how sound and listening can reshape how we understand and design urban space, positioning them as critical tools for urban inquiry and spatial justice.
Collaborative projects underpinning or emerging from this work include: Recomposing the City, co-founded with architect Sarah Lappin in 2012; Scoring the City, developed with urbanist John Bingham Hall; the design-oriented workshops Designing Sonic Refuge (with Nathalie Harb) and Designing Vibrational Architecture (with Jan St. Werner); and experimental research programmes on urban sonic materialities, ecologies, and energies, developed with partners at DAAD Gallery in Berlin and Central Saint Martins (MA Cities) in London.
Ouzounian’s work also extends into exhibitions and experimental collaborations with artists, architects, and designers, exploring how sonic methods can inform urban and spatial research and design.
Across her work, Ouzounian argues that sound and vibration are not peripheral to urban and public life but fundamental to how cities are built, inhabited, governed, and contested. By theorising cities as vibrational territories and developing ‘counterlistening’ as a critical method, her research offers new conceptual tools for understanding the entanglement of sound, environment, violence, and everyday life.
At Oxford she teaches and supervises undergraduate and postgraduate research on sound studies, sonic urbanism, sonic violence, and experimental sound practices.