Distributed Sensing: Mapping the Sonic Periphery

Tini Aliman

This lecture performance presents an ongoing sound practice that explores how biological entities such as plants, wood, and soil function as distributed sensing bodies within expanded frameworks of perception. Developed over several years, the work translates subtle bioelectrical activity into sonic material, foregrounding signals that exist at the margins of human perception. Through a live demonstration using plant interfaces and found organic matter, the presentation situates biodata sonification as both a technical method and a speculative listening practice, engaging with interoception, environmental attunement, and non-verbal forms of communication. In the context of neurodiverse sensory worlds, the work proposes alternative modes of access and interpretation, where perception is relational, unstable, and continuously negotiated across human and non-human systems. By working with living and once-living materials, the performance traces how sound emerges through contact, resistance, and variability, mapping a sonic periphery that resists standardisation. The practice operationalises it, offering a method of listening that privileges ambiguity, multiplicity, and contributes to broader conversations on inclusive and distributed ways of sensing and inhabiting the world.