Migration is often described through borders, journeys, and distances travelled. People leave cities, cross countries, settle elsewhere, and gradually build new lives. Less often do we ask what migration sounds like. Yet movement between places changes more than physical location. Familiar sounds disappear from everyday life while new ones slowly become woven into routine experience. Voices remain in memory long after people and places have gone, and certain sounds can unexpectedly return us somewhere we thought we had left behind.
During an online guest lecture, Dr Ximena Alarcón explored these less visible experiences through sound, asking whether listening might reveal dimensions of migration that geography alone struggles to capture. Drawing on her own experiences of moving from Colombia to Europe, alongside years of artistic and research practice, she explored how listening can become a way of understanding relationships between people, places, and memory.
Dr Alarcón is a sound artist, researcher, and Deep Listening practitioner whose work combines collaborative performance, sound art, memory, and digital technologies. Across these projects and reflections, one idea repeatedly surfaced: listening is not simply an act of hearing sounds that already exist around us. It can also become a way of tracing experiences, understanding relationships, and making sense of where we belong.
Many of these ideas first developed through an apparently ordinary experience. After growing up in Bogotá and later encountering underground transport systems in European cities, Alarcón became increasingly interested in the environments created by these systems. Most people barely notice them. Announcements repeat endlessly, trains arrive and disappear, and routine eventually turns entire spaces into background activity. Daily commuting often becomes something we stop consciously hearing. Yet beneath that familiarity, people continue forming subtle relationships with the spaces around them, carrying emotions, frustrations, routines, and memories through these environments day after day. Alarcón became interested in what kinds of traces these repeated experiences might leave behind.
This question developed into Sounding Underground, a project exploring underground systems in London, Mexico City, and Paris. Participants recorded journeys, selected sounds they considered meaningful, and reflected on the experiences attached to them. Rather than documenting transport systems themselves, the project explored relationships formed through listening.
“What memories have people when they listen during routine journeys?”
Responses revealed something surprising. Participants recognised common rhythms and textures across different cities while also identifying details that felt distinctive to each place. One participant described experiencing the three underground systems as though they formed a single connected network rather than separate environments. Sounds that would usually disappear into the background of everyday life suddenly felt more intimate. Mechanical noises, station announcements, and passing voices acquired emotional significance, becoming linked with memory and familiarity in ways that might otherwise remain unnoticed.
Questions that initially centred on transport systems gradually grew more personal. Listening repeatedly to memories of movement raised another question that redirected Alarcón’s work entirely: “I would like to listen to my own migration.” Attention moved away from cities themselves and towards the experiences carried through them. The question was no longer simply how environments sound, but how memories, identities, and relationships continue shaping listening long after movement has taken place. This transition led Alarcón towards Deep Listening, a practice developed by Pauline Oliveros that encourages expanded awareness of sound, body, memory, and environment.
Deep Listening extends beyond identifying sounds within a space. Listening becomes connected with silence, bodily awareness, dreams, movement, and relationships with others. Alarcón described keeping dream diaries as part of this process, recording fragments of dreams before they disappeared into waking life. Listening was no longer directed only towards external environments. It became a way of tracing relationships between memories and experiences that might otherwise pass unnoticed. Migration consequently began to appear as something more complex than movement between locations. Memories from different places continue existing alongside present experiences, while voices from the past remain present within current surroundings. Different versions of ourselves emerge over time rather than simply replacing one another.
Language became an important part of this exploration. During the lecture, Alarcón reflected on the experience of moving between English and Spanish, describing how speaking different languages can sometimes feel like moving between different versions of oneself.
“When you speak more than one language, you start to create a different personality when you switch between languages.”
Many people who speak more than one language immediately recognise this feeling. Words change, though something else changes as well. Rhythm changes, gesture changes, and emotional expression often shifts in subtle ways. Certain ideas suddenly become easier to express while others seem to disappear entirely. Alarcón described this through the idea of the “nomadic voice”, suggesting that migrants often inhabit spaces that are neither entirely one place nor another. Instead, memories, identities, and experiences overlap and remain in motion, creating what she described as in-between spaces.
Questions about memory and identity eventually expanded beyond individual experience. If listening could reveal something about personal migration, could it also create meaningful connections between people separated by geography? This question shaped projects such as Letters and Bridges and Migratory Dreams, where participants in different countries exchanged letters, shared dreams, recorded sounds, and developed collaborative sonic performances across distance. Unexpectedly, participants often described feeling close to people they had never physically met.
One of the most memorable moments emerged during Migratory Dreams. Participants in Bogotá perceived London as sonically dense and heavily urban. During performances they instinctively introduced sounds of nature, almost as if attempting to return something they felt migrants living in London had lost. Across continents, participants were not simply exchanging sounds or creating performances. Listening had become a way of caring for distant people through shared experience.
Although these projects emerged through experiences of migration, the ideas discussed throughout the lecture extend far beyond migration itself. Sound design often focuses on realism, immersion, and technical precision, yet Alarcón’s work suggested broader possibilities. Sound can preserve memory, support identity, and create relationships between people separated by distance.
Migration, in this sense, may involve more than moving between places. Physical journeys eventually end, yet the quieter journeys shaped by memory, identity, and listening often continue long afterwards. Alarcón’s lecture suggested that people do not simply travel across spaces. They also continue travelling through experiences, relationships, and sounds that remain with them long after they arrive.
