2026 Programme
Wed 15th – Sat 18th April 2026
Performance
IF Festival Stream
IICSI’s 7th annual Improvisation Festival (IF) will run in collaboration with Sonorities Festival Belfast 2026, broadcast on the Sonorities homepage throughout the festival. A schedule and programme notes will be added to this page before the start of the festival....
Featuring
Exhibition
SARC Gallery
The Gallery at SARC is a new space for immersive, audio-visual and physical interaction artistic practice. An intimate space, with concealed equipment offers four-side projection and surround sound. The gallery programme for Sonorities was curated from an overwhelming response to...
Exhibition
SARC Installations
Seven works to explore throughout the SARC building **Festival volunteers will be on hand to guide you from the SARC Foyer** SARC Foyer: Susannah Knights – Tunis Cassette: a pop-up listening station Stage Box: Annie Dunning – Cochlea II Interaction...
Exhibition
Black Metal Studies
A site-responsive performance and installation piece contemplating the kernel of black metal – using voices, electronics and charcoal. Two scheduled performances on Wednesday 15 April are followed by public exhibition of the documentation of these performances and the physical traces...
Exhibition
Live Organs, Mechanised Ghosts
Live Organs, Mechanical Ghosts, Dissected, Discarded, Assembled and strewn digitally-controlled vascular system, Electric reanimation, PVC veins, Tinned copper nerves, Inflated latex organs, Lead scraps, Automated breath, Stirs with an uneasy, half vital motion, Deforming, Singing a photographic negative, Sighing or...
Wed 15th April 2026
Talk
Symposium Session 1
This session will include three presentations, followed by time for discussion. Erin Demastes – Found Objects, Play, & Creativity Gerard Ryan – Improvising Without Outcome: Listening to the Infrastructure of Consumption Cameron Clarke – Lead by Landscape
Sound Walk
The Lagan Towpath Soundwalk
Meet outside Cutters Wharf. Transport will be provided for return journey to SARC. Please bring headphones and a smartphone to the walk. In advance of the please download the Echoes spatial audio app. Parts of this walk will feature audio...
Performance
ADrift
ADrift is an audio-visual, environmental sound art performance. It features a long-form, site-specific, livestreamed, sub-aquatic audio broadcast using hydrophones deployed from an open canoe drifting down the River Lagan through Belfast. This live soundtrack will provide the underscore for a...
Talk
Symposium Session 2
This session will include four presentations, followed by time for discussion. Rachel Austin – Feeding Uncertainty and Finding Community in rural Southern USA Emiddio Vasquez – Can the Subaltern even Listen? Mervyn Horgan – Dwelling Differently: Improvisatory Infrastructures in Public...
Exhibition
SARC Mobile - Georgios Varoutsos
Meet at Buoy Park, BT3 9FG. A bespoke field work vehicle for specialised multichannel audio-visual experiences, recording and broadcast, this unique facility combine professional multichannel HD audio-visual capturing and streaming equipment as well as an immersive playback system allowing for...
Performance
Rrose
Rrose will perform a concert of music developed specially for the Sonic Lab at SARC.
Performance
Adjunct Ensemble + Bill Orcutt
Adjunct Ensemble Composer and producer Jamie Thompson‘s Adjunct Ensemble is a band with two critically acclaimed releases to its name; 2023’s ‘Sovereign Bodies / Ritual Taxonomy’ (Diatribe Records), a hugely expansive anti-opera of jazz-punk, turntablism, spoken word, and glitching electronics;...
Thur 16th April 2026
Performance
Immersive Concert 1
The programming for the two Sonic Lab Immersive concerts reflects recent upgrades to the Lab’s spatial system. Nine pieces are programmed across two concerts, including multichannel fixed media, live electronics and mixed instrumental and electronic works featuring Kyle Hutchins and...
Sound Walk
An Acoustic Commons of the East Atlantic Flyway: Belfast
A site-specific sound walk and participatory performance in Botanic Gardens. Meet in the SARC foyer. The project considers how we share space with other species, specifically wild local songbirds in urban areas. It will be focused on birds that migrate...
Performance
BAILE/home
Where is home? For millions of displaced people, this question is becoming increasingly difficult to answer. Home can be a place of nurture, safety, and ancestral roots, or a place of oppression, lack of opportunity, and loss. Homes can be...
Talk
Symposium Session 3
This session will include four presentations, followed by time for discussion. Sarah Raine – Improvising Across Boundaries: Exploring gender and inclusive practice through collaborative research Shane Byrne, Niall O’Connor & Simon Cullen – Improvising Futures Through Play: Flourishing in the...
Exhibition
SARC Mobile - Cameron Clarke
Meet in SARC lobby. A bespoke field work vehicle for specialised multichannel audio-visual experiences, recording and broadcast, this unique facility combine professional multichannel HD audio-visual capturing and streaming equipment as well as an immersive playback system allowing for research, dissemination...
Performance
Climate | Sound | Action 1
For the Climate | Sound | Action series co-produced by Sonorities and Reach’26 Arts and Sustainability Festival, we have programmed works that explore or respond to environmental challenges, align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or propose new, sustainable approaches...
Performance
RÓIS + Brìghde Chaimbeul
RÓIS is a composer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and electronic artist from Fermanagh, whose songs breathe new life into a forgotten Ireland. Her 2024 release MO LÉAN has swept the board winning the 2025 RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards: Best Emerging Artist...
Performance
Night Spells
This late-night solo piano programme is a reflection on the works and influences of Morton Feldman. Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble’s Daniel Browell performs works spanning Feldman’s career, including those inspired by visual patterns and artists of the time. During the...
Fri 17th April 2026
Performance
Immersive Concert 2
The programming for the two Sonic Lab Immersive concerts reflects recent upgrades to the Lab’s spatial system. Nine pieces are programmed across two concerts, including multichannel fixed media, live electronics and mixed instrumental and electronic works. All works are adapted...
Sound Walk
Ancestors Walking
‘Ancestors Walking’ is a sound walk, a workshop, and a performance at the same time, which highlights the meditative quality of the sound-walking practice. Meet in the SARC foyer. Bring a device which can download/play/stream audio files, alongside your headphones/earphones,...
Performance
Climate | Sound | Action 2
For the Climate | Sound | Action series co-produced by Sonorities and Reach’26 Arts and Sustainability Festival, we have programmed works that explore or respond to environmental challenges, align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or propose new, sustainable approaches to artistic...
Talk
Symposium Session 4
This session will include three presentations, followed by time for discussion. Matías Homar & Angela López – Enactive Composition: Improvising Futures Through Adaptable Ecosystems Ed Williams – Decomposition: Queering Time and Timbre Isabel Bredenbröker & Adam Pultz Melbye – Improvising...
Talk
Symposium Session 5
This session will include three presentations, followed by time for discussion. Lola de la Mata – Quietly Anarchic Self-Noise Eric Lewis – You Stepped Out of a Dream: Imagining Imagining Futures–Jeanne Lee and the Politics of the Possible Kevin McNeilly...
Performance
Robocobra Quartet
Robocobra Quartet are a musical collective from Ireland. Formed at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast, they blend art-rock, improvisation and spoken word to create a concoction that has brought them to Montreux Jazz Festival, Glastonbury and as far...
Performance
Handmade Music
Handmade Music at Accidental Theatre returns to Sonorities with a special extended edition, featuring a roving sound installation and ten live acts, headlined by nomadic father/daughter duo Yeah You (aka Gustav Thomas and Elvin Brandhi). A big element of Handmade...
Sat 18th April 2026
Sound Walk
WATER WALK, WATER TALK, WATER LISTEN
This two-hour sound walk and sharing circle explores the sensory, mythic, ecological and political dimensions of the waters around Belfast, through the lens of the Rights of Nature movement and newly formed River Rights UK network. Starting point: Ormeau Library....
Performance
TAC(I)ET - implied silence
Performance starts at 11:30am. The instruments will be available for audience interaction from 12-1pm. This is a performance version of the sound installation by the same name that will be running Wed-Fri in SARC. A sound installation which will include...
Performance
Ghost Trance Music
This concert and tribute to Anthony Braxton features graphic scores, also including those by Sarah Watts and Ioana Petcu Colan, based on her artwork ‘Kanon à 4’, created from previously-played violin bow hair, on a quadriptych of prepared panels to...
Performance
LEZU
Two short performances coinciding with the LEZU installation running all day on Saturday as part of SARC Installations. LEZU transforms the Armenian alphabet into a multisensory performance of sound and visuals. Using two custom-built controllers, one with sliders and buttons...
Talk
Keynote Panel: Co-creative Continuums
In this two-part keynote, Eric Fillion and Ellen Waterman draw on their respective archive-based and practice-based research and community-facing work to reflect on the relationship between imagining new possible worlds and bringing them into being, highlighting improvisation as a vital...
Performance
Adam Pultz Melbye + Sabine Vogel
Adam Pultz Melbye: On the Learning of Parrots and Humans The Spectral Parrot is a self-(de/re)tuning string instrument that uses machine learning to mimic to its sonic environment. In this performance, Adam Pultz—double bass player and creator of the Spectral...
Performance
أحمد [Ahmed]
أحمد [Ahmed] is: PAT THOMAS / piano ANTONIN GERBAL / drums JOEL GRIP / bass SEYMOUR WRIGHT / alto saxophone This is music of heavy rhythm, repetition and syncopation set deep into an understanding of jazz and the obscure depths of its...