This two-day workshop explores the voice beyond the distinction between speech and music. It approaches whispering as a sonic, social, and psychoacoustic phenomenon, inviting participants to reconsider how voice can be used, perceived, and experienced.

The workshop begins with an introduction to how whispering functions — how it travels through space, how it is processed by the human ear, and how its subtle qualities can shape collective listening. Through group discussions and simple exercises, participants will explore whispering as both an intimate and shared practice.

On the second day, joined by Bint Mbareh, the workshop shifts into a collective choir format. Participants will work with layered whispering, experimenting with how quiet, individual voices can accumulate into dense and immersive sound environments. The process will culminate in a live performance as part of the Rites of Eternal Wind concert program.

The workshop is open to everyone — no prior experience in singing or sound practice is required.

Impossible Territories — an interdisciplinary platform, founded in 2019, run by Julia Shärifulla, a Basel-based sound artist, scholar, and clinical psychologist. Centered on workshops and improvisational performances, the platform explores field recordings, sonic psychogeography, and the psychoacoustics of sound and listening. Julia works across various media to make sonic practices more accessible and less mythologized, reintegrating them into everyday life.

Bint Mbareh — a sound researcher with a focus on water in Palestine. Her interest in the physical parallel between the water wave and the sound wave leads her into questions of border dissolutions (between bodies, between states, between tenses), and into the possibility of being enveloped by the voice, by sounding communally similarly to being enveloped by a water body.

The workshop will be held over the course of two days:

5 May, 15:00–18:00

6 May, 14:00–16:00

8 May – performance

No previous experience in singing or making music is required.

Capacity: up to 20 participants

Language: English and Russian

To participate

Please fill out the registration form via the link before May 3, 11:59PM

photo by Anna Marchenkova