Wiska Radkiewicz received her doctorate in music composition from Princeton University and is an electroacoustic composer and sound artist with a focus on pedagogical studies, audio-visual composition and creative writing.
Radkiewicz has also received training at the Conservatory of Warsaw, Poland and the City University of New York for composition, the University of Paris-Sorbonne for musicology, and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales — Conservatory of Paris for electronic music composition. She now lives and works in Roosevelt, New Jersey.
In 2000, Radkiewicz initiated the SoundSon Project with Paris-based artist Andrea Cohen, and together they co-direct this web-based approach to audio sharing and collaborative composition. Based on principles developed in the SoundSon environment, composers and students from around the world are able to engage in an ongoing exchange of sounds from which a common composition can be created. A series of works created in this way by Radkiewicz, Cohen, and their collaborators have been aired, performed, and published internationally by Radio France, NAISA (New Adventures in Sound Art (Toronto), and the 2014 Invisible Places conference (Portugal), among others.
Wiska Radkiewicz and longtime collaborator, Andrea Cohen, are sound artists who have created instrumental, electro-acoustic, and mixed music as well as radio, theatrical and audiovisual works. In 2000 they formed the SoundSon Collective within which they collaborate on various audio projects as well as on pedagogical activities. Their working partnership sprang not only from their shared artistic interests, but also from a personal friendship of many years. Living on different continents (North America and Europe), they have developed their own unique ways of communicating with sounds and of composing online with soundscapes. As a result, they have created situations which allow individual perceptions to merge into a collective sensitivity and expression. The collaborative nature of their activities inspired them to invite artists from other countries to join them in their audio communications.
The guiding aesthetic choice Radkiewicz and Cohen have made in their collaborative work is the principle of composing with sounds captured from the real world. Their understanding of music rests on a sound domain in the broadest sense, including spoken voice, sounds produced by objects, and environmental sounds. Their work is an expanded concept of music, defined as sound organization without prioritizing certain sounds over others.
Their mutual interest in communication with sound and composition with soundscapes inspired a search for an idiosyncratic and experimental approach to audio sharing and collaborative composition, which ultimately became the SoundSon Project, a web-based interface and meeting place which allows composers or students from around the world to collaborate on sound compositions through an ongoing exchange of sounds.
All the collective works created in the SoundSon environment are composed from soundscapes recorded by the participating artists. These recordings constitute a bank of sounds which are then used in the composition. Based on many years of composing collaboratively in this way, Radkiewicz and Cohen have come to believe that the act of attentive sound recording generates an intense relationship with one’s environment, and that by sharing their individual recordings, participating artists share this intensity with others while negotiating both divergences and convergences between individual sensitivities.
