Written by Sara Spencer
July 28-31, 2026, EDGE West was honored to collaborate with artist-scientist Idil Kocabozdoğan during the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD) in Bielefeld, Germany.
Under the theme of UNERHÖRT! (“unheard of!”), EDGE West explored physiological and biological phenomena that otherwise remain unheard (of) in our day-to-day lives. As a sound performance session at the intersection of art and medicine, UNERHÖRT! urged its audience to hear and connect with phenomena that are often drowned out by the noise of the virtual and the abstract.
Idil Kocabozdoğan: Physicians and Bodily Sounds
Idil Kocabozdoğan holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Boğaziçi University and is completing a Master’s in Sonic Arts at the Center for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM) at Istanbul Technical University. Her work translates physiological and biological processes into live sound: a participatory, real-time neurofeedback performance, and an electroacoustic composition built from field recordings in a hospital emergency department. It treats the body and its environments as sonic material, illustrating scientific data by making it tangible. She proposes auditory display as a tool for closing the distance between scientific knowledge and lived experience, challenging the politics of scientific knowledge. Sonification can be a perceptual interface that lets audiences encounter complex physiological signals directly.
The session included a 15-minute performance and a short behind-the-scenes talk, in which Idil Kocabozdoğan reflected on her process and research. Audiences were invited to listen, participate, and reflect on their own experiences with unheard-of processes. Rather than illustrating data or visualizing research, this performance asks what it means to hear physiological phenomena. Furthermore, this approach supported accessibility by allowing non-experts to engage intuitively with concepts such as neural oscillations and autonomic regulation through sound.
Idil Kocabozdoğan draws on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted inside the emergency department of Taksim Training and Research Hospital in Istanbul. Over the course of her research, she recorded the acoustic environment of the department and spoke at length with practicing physicians about how they listen, exploring how clinical decisions take shape through sound, amid the layered noise of machines, bodies, and urgency. Her live electroacoustic composition weaves field recordings, machine signals, and fragments of physiological rhythm into a piece that preserves the texture of that environment rather than abstracting it away. The work asks how medical knowledge is held in the ear, and what it means to interpret bodily signals under pressure.
Stay connected with EDGE Neuroscience to attend more similiar and exciting events in the future, as we blur the lines between science and art.
