In its second funding period (2026-2029), the project will focus on a further dimension of the social dynamics of musical polyphony, enquiring into the tactile structures within which contemporary music unfolds its potential for intervention. The planned research will proceed from the hypothesis that moments of touching and affectedness are decisive for the realisation of musical interventions. The investigations will draw on multisensory understandings of touch as interruption, the coming-to-awareness, and relational capacity, as developed most notably in the philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida. The project's commitment to a non-Eurocentric conception of polyphony will be pursued by re-identifying interruptions and interstices of sensory touch as relational spaces of intervention, and by deriving from this identification an understanding of their political potential.

With reference to the independent music scenes of experimental music, music theatre and sound art in Berlin and London, the two sub-projects will analyse polyphonic interventions within their specific infrastructures. With a particular focus on digital-analogue interventions, the project will examine — at the intersection of corporeality and codification — how polyphony increasingly differentiates and politically charges encounters and moments of touch in music as discrete multiplicity (singulier pluriel). Within the collaborative research centre (CRC), the project will contribute to Area A, " Participating - Parting," by investigating the causal relationships between transformative experiences in musical interventions and their infrastructural consolidations.

Head of Project

Prof. Dr. Ariane Jeßulat (SP 1)

Postdoctoral Researcher

Dr. Jasmina Samssuli (SP 2)

Student Assistant

Esther Kontarsky