Presseinformation: Vibrant environments: sonic agency in the Anthropocene

Nr. 88 - 23.06.2026

Göttingen University Musicologist awarded ERC Advanced Grant of 2.6 million euros for VibE

Birgit Abels, Professor of Cultural Musicology at the University of Göttingen, has been awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC has funded her project “Vibrant Environmentality: Sonic Agentivity in the Anthropocene” (VibE) with around 2.6 million euros over a period of five years. This award will allow Abels and her team to investigate how people co-create their world through interaction with sound and how making music can be key to possible responses to existential crises. This funding follows on directly from her ERC Consolidator Grant, which was awarded in 2020.

Research from the natural sciences has shown that consciousness plays a role in shaping reality: physical objects only appear as objects with certain properties when an interaction takes place between an observer and an object. On this basis, the researchers involved in the VibE project figure that sound plays a central role in the creation of lived realities. “To a significant extent – though one that has scarcely been researched to date – people derive their capacity for action from their bodily experiences and from co-creating their environments through sound,” explains Abels. The researchers see this experience and the resulting capacity for action as an opportunity to deepen human imagination of new pathways and potentially pathbreaking collaborations beyond that which can be clearly seen or expressed – an opportunity not to be missed in the light of the current existential crises including climate change.

“By bringing together case studies from Asia and the Pacific Islands that focus on the ecological wisdom inherent in music-making, we aim to gain a better understanding of how people know how to shape their environment through sound-based practices,” said Abels. “We are exploring this untapped potential of music-making through ethnographic research. This will provide new answers to the existential challenges of our time and make these conceptually accessible – so that they can then be widely utilised both practically and intellectually.”

Birgit Abels, born in 1980, studied Arabic and musicology in Bochum and London. Her PhD thesis about the music of the island nation of Palau was awarded the ICAS Book Prize in 2009. For several years, her fieldwork took her to the Pacific Ocean (particularly Micronesia), North India, and the Southeast Asian Island world. As a postdoctoral researcher, she worked in Leiden and Amsterdam in the Netherlands as well as Kota Kinabalu in Malaysia. Abels’ research focuses on the physicality of musical experience, sound-based epistemologies and the phenomenology of music in postcolonial contexts. She has been Professor of Cultural Musicology/ Ethnomusicology at the University of Göttingen since 2011.

The European Union’s ERC Advanced Grants support outstanding researchers who are already well-established in their academic careers, funding projects that promise groundbreaking new insights.

Contact:

Professor Birgit Abels

University of Göttingen

Faculty of Humanities

Department of Musicology

Tel: +49 (0)551 39-28339

Email: babels@uni-goettingen.de