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Listening to Where We Live
The HERE Lab at Rhodes University explores African sound cultures and acoustic ecologies, using listening as a way to understand how people, places and environments relate to one another.
Centering African Sound
in Research, Teaching and Practice
Led by Prof Boudina McConnachie in the Humanities Faculty at Rhodes University, the HERE Lab brings together scholars, performers and culture-bearers to work with sound as knowledge. Through research, teaching, performance and archiving, the Lab centres African musical arts and sonic practices, and creates a place and space for new forms of scholarship and pedagogy to emerge.
Sound, for the HERE Lab, is a way of observing the world. It shapes how people experience place and time, how they remember, and how they move through everyday life. By working closely with communities and practitioners, the Lab records and reimagines these sound practices for future generations.
Our Approach
Our vision is an Africa where communities reimagine and shape the future through sound.
Our mission is to create a dynamic space where scholars, performers and culture-bearers can explore, collaborate and archive, towards an inclusive African musical arts and sound practice.
To achieve this, we focus on three interconnected objectives:
Research, reimagine and remember Africa’s soundscapes
We explore African soundscapes and their effects through scholarship and creative practice, paying attention to how listening, performance, and everyday sound shape people’s experience of place, time and relationship.
Develop research capacity for African performance arts and sound studies
We build research capacity in indigenous, traditional, and contemporary African performance arts and sound studies by supporting postgraduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and collaborators working in these fields.
Create a dynamic hub for African music and sound practice
We are creating a dynamic physical and virtual hub to explore, collaborate, and archive African musical arts and sound practice, including the HERE Lab Archive, public events, and spaces for shared listening, learning, and remembering.
Our Research
Our research investigates Africa’s soundscapes and their effects through scholarship and creative practice, grounded in collaboration with community practitioners and knowledge-bearers.
Remembering and reimagining sound in Africa
We work with communities and culture-bearers to document, remember and reimagine sound practices, paying attention to how listening, music and storytelling shape memory, belonging and everyday life.
Sound, knowledge and pedagogy
We explore how sound and performance can be used in knowledge creation and teaching, contributing towards an Indigenous music pedagogy that centres African approaches to learning and making.
Sound and science
We experiment with the role that sound and music can play in communicating African science, developing creative ways to share research with academic, community and industry audiences.
Together, these strands contribute to strengthened scholarship around African approaches to music, sound and their effects, and create more safe spaces and innovative models for knowledge co-creation with researchers, practitioners and communities.
Our Impact
Through its research, teaching and collaborations, the HERE Lab is laying the groundwork for a living archive of African sound. Each project, performance, recording and residency contributes to a shared resource that can be used by students, researchers, artists and communities – supporting new scholarship, strengthening intergenerational knowledge transfer and making African sound cultures more visible within and beyond the university.
The Lab’s work is inspired by the idea of an anarchive: a living, evolving constellation of sounds, stories and practices that is kept alive through activation rather than storage. Recordings and materials are re-encountered, reassembled and re-contextualised over time, reflecting memory as an embodied, contested and relational practice. Under the leadership of Prof Boudina McConnachie, this work draws on practice-led, sensory and collaborative research, ensuring that the archive grows through ongoing relationships with artists, communities and students rather than as a static collection. This focus on embodied, sensory and performative research forms the core of our approach.
Founder
Prof Boudina McConnachie
Lead, HERE Lab
Rhodes University
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