Jorge Martínez Valderrama is a Mexican composer and sound artist based in Mexico City. His background is in classical composition, string quartets, chamber ensembles, the discipline of writing for live instruments, but he has moved steadily toward acousmatic work, where fixed media and field recording become the primary material. For Jorge, a recording is never a neutral act. Where to point a microphone, when to press record, what to do with the sound afterwards… these are always conscious choices, and in Mexico City, where certain places carry real political complexity, they are sometimes consequential ones.

For Flow, he worked on Segment 23 of the River Lech, the stretch just beyond Augsburg where the river is split in two: on one side a canal running through a former hydropower station, now a museum; on the other, a channel that is still constrained but visibly alive, moving, breathing, trying to find its own course. The field recording was taken on the more natural half, where a family was playing on the gravel and a child was throwing pebbles into the water, shrieking with excitement.

That child made it into the final composition.

Cuando el cauce recuerda (When the Riverbed Remembers) will be presented at the Sonidario in Mexico City, a dedicated listening space at Los Pinos (the former presidential residence) fitted with 46 speakers in fifth-order ambisonics. The piece that began beside a river in Bavaria will be heard in three dimensions, in a room designed for exactly this kind of listening.

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Cuando el cauce recuerda (When the riverbed remembers) is a piece created for the Flow project, which focuses on exploring the presence and memories of water in different territories. The work stems from a field recording made on the Lech River, on the outskirts of Augsburg. It is in this stretch of the river where the landscape opens up again: the riverbed reclaims space and its sound expands.The work is situated in a sonic territory that navigates between soundscape and electroacoustic music and suggests, through an everyday moment—a scene of encounter between nature, industrial memory, and community life—that it constitutes the initial material of the composition.The field recording underwent a spectral analysis process that allowed for the separation of different sound components. Each of these layers was subsequently transformed using various sound processing and synthesis techniques, including temporal stretching, filtering, and spectral manipulations. From these operations, new textures, densities, and perspectives of the original material emerged, generating an expanded auditory field.Rather than simply reconstructing the place in a documentary style, the piece seeks to explore its latent resonances. Processed fragments of the river and the sound of voices are transformed into sound currents themselves, revealing invisible or inaudible layers of the environment.In this sense, water appears as a form of song that is heard again after having been silenced. When the river returns, it is thus an invitation to listen attentively, to resonate with the flow of the landscape, and to recover, through play and sonic imagination, our sensitive relationship with rivers.

- Jorge Martínez Valderrama

Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).

Nick Kuepfer is a musician, field recordist, and sound designer based in Montreal, Canada. His practice moves between nylon string and electric guitar, live-sampled tape loops, field recordings, and analog processing — a methodical, vigilant experimentalism guided by the search for consonance and dissonance with the sounds of the natural world. He has recorded the intimate sounds of Alaska’s permafrost thawing, glacial calving off the coast of Svalbard, the creaking forests of Tierra del Fuego, and the amphibian soundscapes of Costa Rica. He has done sound design for Austrian filmmaker Michaela Grill and is a member of A Common Collective, a Canadian artists’ collective producing immersive audio-visual installations.

Read more on artmusicscience.substack.com

Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).

Lisa Rae Bartolomei is a composer and sound artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her work explores the boundaries between acoustic and electronic sound, often using transformation as both method and metaphor — taking a source material and pulling it so far from its origins that something entirely new emerges in its place.

For Flow, she worked on Segment 6 of the River Lech — the hanging bridge at Forchach, a stunning suspension structure that arches over the most braided and dynamic stretch of the entire river, in the heart of the Naturpark Tiroler Lech. People walk across it, and occasionally cycle despite the prohibition, and their passage makes the steel cables vibrate like the strings of a giant instrument.

That image — a bridge as instrument, a crossing as sound — became Lisa’s entry point. Living on the other side of the world, she allowed the River Lech to exist for her as something between a landscape and an abstraction, a place known only through recordings and images. The bridge felt like a liminal space, neither here nor there, suspended between worlds the way the river itself hangs between its alpine origins and its eventual dissolution into the Danube. She used Omnisphere to play the bridge cables like a piano, building a composition in which every sound traces back to the original field recording — transformed, stretched, processed beyond recognition, yet rooted in the same source. The water, she says, is mysteriously absent. Just outside the frame of the piece. Always there, never heard.

Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).

Karhide and Deep Dive Sound collaborated on Segment 20 of the River Lech, near Königsbrunn — a channelised stretch dammed for hydropower, heavily modified, and without restoration plans. The same paradox that struck Elissa Goodrich in the same segment: a landscape shaped entirely by human intervention that has nonetheless become a refuge for nature.

But where most artists stayed close to the River Lech, Rafa was in Africa when the project arrived. Rather than treating that distance as an obstacle, they turned into a creative advantage. The Lech became a template, a way of thinking about any river, any ecosystem, any place where water gathers life around it. Field recordings from African rivers found their way into the piece: not as decoration, but as a reminder that the questions the project asks about the Lech are not specific to Bavaria. They belong to every river that has ever been dammed, redirected, or simply listened to.

Low-Fi River Flow is the result — a piece built from that expanded geography, and from a shared conviction that a river is never just water.

Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).

Tim Wojcik is a media and sound artist based in Weimar, Germany. His practice moves between electroacoustic composition, field recording, and a form of deep listening that he describes as meditative — a way of being present with a landscape rather than simply documenting it.

For Flow, he worked on Segment 10 of the River Lech — the Lech Falls, near Füssen, where the river passes through a gorge that may have given the city its name. The Latin word for gorge, fauces, is thought by some to be the origin of Füssen. The falls themselves are artificial, created by a weir built in the late eighteenth century and marketed at the time as a picturesque landscape feature. Since 1895 a bridge has carried visitors over the waterfall, making this purely engineered spectacle one of the area’s most popular tourist destinations.

Tim visited the site in person on a January Saturday, walking south along the river with microphones and recorders, spending a full day in the landscape. He recorded in six locations, crossing from Germany into Austria, where the river runs calm and flat — until a slippery bank sent the battery cover of his recorder sliding into the water. The composition that emerged from that day is structured geographically, moving from Austria northward toward the falls, mirroring the journey on foot. He called it until the fall.

Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).

Steffi Baron-Neuhuber is a musician and sound artist based in Pöchlarn, Austria. Her practice moves between improvisation, electronic music, and a deep attentiveness to the sonic qualities of place — listening not just to what a landscape sounds like, but to what it might be trying to say.

For Flow, she worked on Segment 17 of the River Lech, near Pitzling — the same stretch as Gretchen Jude, though the two arrived at entirely different places. Where Gretchen heard a D-flat major triad and imagined water spirits entranced by a machine, Steffi heard something more restless: a river with a story it hadn’t finished telling. Heavily modified, lacking natural dynamics, no restoration plans in sight. And yet, as Steffi put it, the electricity plants won’t be there forever. The river will.

That sense of geological patience — the river outlasting everything built around it — shaped both the title and the emotional register of her composition. lechlechtz is a wordplay on the German verb lechzen, to yearn. A yearning for what the river once was, held alongside a quiet certainty about what it will become again.

Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).

Cara Kelly is a composer and sound artist from Galway, Ireland. Her practice lives at what she calls the threshold — of sound, language, technology, folklore, myth, and poetry — and her approach to composition is rooted in research, respect for the source material, and a sensitivity to the hidden connections between things.

When she encountered the River Lech, she noticed a linguistic thread connecting her native Irish to the river’s name. The Irish word leac — a large flat stone, traditionally placed at the entrance to a home — shares an ancient Celtic root with Lech, itself meaning the stony one. Two languages, centuries and geography apart, carrying the same memory of stone and water.

For Flow, she worked on Segment 9 of the River Lech — the first free-flowing segment coming from downstream, near Pflach in Austria, where alternating sediment bars meet the industrial noise of a gravel extraction factory processing material dug directly from the riverbed. A place where the river’s geological memory and its present-day exploitation exist side by side.

Her composition is called Segment No. 9.

Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).

There is a particular kind of silence that concrete makes around water. Not absence of sound, but a different quality of presence — the echo of walls, the hum of engineered constraint. When Paco Maddalena, an Italian ambient and experimental music producer, first listened to the field recording from Segment 19 of the River Lech, that echo was what he heard first. Not the water itself, but the structure surrounding it.

Segment 19 is a fish passage — a channel carved into concrete under a road, built to simulate conditions natural enough for fish to navigate past a dam. A form of imitation: nature reproduced inside infrastructure, the river redirected and constrained for hydropower production, with no restoration plans and no natural geomorphic dynamics remaining. The water moves peacefully. The echo quietly reveals where you are.

That tension became the emotional and compositional core of Echo Under Concrete. Paco’s reading of this segment is one of endurance rather than loss — the river carrying an intrinsic momentum that no amount of engineering has managed to extinguish. Water, fragmented and redirected, still moves forward. Still carries energy and continuity through imposed boundaries, because that is simply what water does.

The composition begins with the field recording in its original, unprocessed form, giving the listener an immediate and unmediated sense of place. Granular synthesis then gradually fragments the sound into micro-particles, stretching and dispersing it into something more unstable and textural — a sonic metaphor for the latent force suppressed beneath engineered control. Modular synthesisers add pulses and resonances, while tape manipulation introduces friction and physical imperfection. At the end, the sound returns to the original recording: a circular movement from reality to abstraction and back again, the river still present as itself despite everything built around it.

Read the full interview on Substack

Amanda Stuart is a composer and sound artist based in Cambridge, UK. Her work moves between contemporary composition, vocal performance, and sonic exploration of landscape — often at the point where the human and the non-human meet.

For Flow, she worked on Segment 5 of the River Lech — one of the most extraordinary stretches of the entire river, and one of the few remaining wild riverine landscapes in the Northern Alps. From above, the river forms characteristic heart-shaped gravel formations, known as the “ears of the upper Lech” or the “string of pearls.” It is the heart of the Naturpark Tiroler Lech, protected under the EU Habitats Directive, home to rare species found almost nowhere else in Central Europe.

Amanda used those heart-shapes as her compositional map. She counted five of them in the satellite imagery and built her piece in five sections, with metallic climaxes at each pinch point — the moments where the river narrows before opening again. But the deeper structure of the piece came from somewhere else entirely: from the Nixe, the shape-shifting female water spirits of Austrian folklore, whose voices float through the composition from beginning to end. Whatever happens to the river, Amanda’s message is clear — the spirits remain.

Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).

Max Greening is an artist and sound designer based in Vancouver, Canada. His practice moves between sound, installation, and conceptual art — often exploring how meaning is constructed, deconstructed, and shaped by context.

For Flow, he worked on Segment 24 of the River Lech — the final stretch before the river merges with the Danube, described in the field recording notes as the Lech’s quiet goodbye. But Max didn’t use the field recording. He didn’t use the satellite imagery. He didn’t research the ecology or the history of the segment.

Instead, he went for an entirely left field approach. He exported all the text messages from the Flow project’s WhatsApp group, assigned an AI voice to each participant, and played the messages back in random order.

The piece is called Flow: Group chat fragments. Stripped of their original sequence, the messages illustrate something the river itself demonstrates: meaning depends on context. What happens upstream determines what can be understood downstream. Remove the order, and the story dissolves.

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