Ultrasoundings

Audio description translates the visual world into spoken language, making imagery accessible to “people who see blindly”¹. Traditional audio description provision is based on the principles that blindness and visual impairment is an absence of vision, and that audio description therefore fills in the gaps and aids in substituting a normative way of seeing. 

My research begins from a different premise: that visuality can be accessed through touch, sound, imagination, scent, and bodily sensation.

When audio description is integrated into a performance as artistic material, it becomes part of the artwork. I seek to deepen this process further, by making description the main element - an artwork that describes itself. Drawing on the structure and precision of traditional audio description, I combine choreographic and musical scores, minimal language with evocative vocal composition to investigate what it might mean to position audio description as a hypersubjective, sensory and embodied practice.

A core exploration is the idea of a vocal and acoustic ultrasound, appropriating the medical technology of ultrasound. Through the experience of chronic illness and encounters with medical imaging — X-rays, ultrasounds, CT and MRI scans, I have become enmeshed in the translation process between pain, disease, flesh, the mechanics of sound echoing through the body to create imagery, and how clinicians translate these images.

How can audio description be understood as a method of orientation, and a redistribution of the senses when encountering an image? What are the extraordinary things that can be learnt from non-normative vision and position?

During my research I will develop performative works, working with vocalists to deliver audio description as scored and sung material. The project’s contribution towards choreographic research and the field of access dramaturgy lies in the development, articulation and dissemination of artistic methods utilising access tools embedded within the choreographic process.

Martin Sonderkamp

Sindri Runudde

2025 - 2029

1. I am using Joseph Rizzo Naudi’s articulation of blindness as “people who see blindly”. Artworks: Ways of Not Seeing [Radio programme]. BBC Radio 4 (9 October 2025) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002kf96 

Louise Ahl website: https://louiseahl.com/