PATCHBENT: Veronica Anne Salinas - Listening as Performance, Improvisation as Sonic Agency

Recorded at Experimental Sound Studio on April 20, 2025 This workshop focuses on improvisation as a social experience. Veronica Anne Salinas leads participants in exploring techniques in improvisation and Deep Listening that aim to shift and expand awareness, agency, and attention through the perceptual process of listening to/with one another. Veronica Anne Salinas is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, writer, and Deep Listener based between Chicago, IL and Texas. Their creative research is rooted in sound, exploring mediums such as compositions, soundwalks, multichannel sound, improvisation, text scores, field recording, writing, and performance. Engaging with themes of perceptual shifts, meditations, slow processes, the body, and ecologies, they use ambient and noise music to attune to subtle transformations in the environment. She is a co-founder and artistic director of Tierras Sonidas, an annual sound art festival in Marfa, TX, a facilitator at Campbient, and currently serves on the board of directors for the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology. She has studied at the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and holds an MFA in Sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. WEATHERING is their ambient noise project. She has presented work at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, National Museum of Mexican Art, Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain, New Music Gathering, Experimental Sound Studio, Museum for Contemporary Art Chicago, Empty Bottle, Omaha Under the Radar Festival, Nameless Sound, and many others. The Patchbent Sessions are a meeting place and learning community supporting women, trans, and non-binary people in sound and music.