Photo © Spiros Karavas

Austrian composer, violinist, and sound artist Mia Zabelka makes chemical and physical processes sensually tangible through her music. Her works are acoustic experiments in which microtonality, extended playing techniques, which she calls “sonic body impulses”, and electronics become tools to make her vision of hidden vibrations of matter audible.

She understands sound not only as an artistic medium but also as a physical and biological phenomenon. With a radically exploratory approach, she traces the music of molecules, navigating frequency spaces where – beyond traditional harmonies – the invisible is revealed: the movement of atoms, the oscillation of chemical bonds, the whisper of organic processes.

Zabelka goes even further. In her exploration of these microstructural sonic landscapes, she seeks access to something that points far beyond the human – a possible acoustic encounter with the essence of super intelligences.

Her music poses questions such as: What do thought processes sound like when they elude our logic? What can the smallest building blocks of life tell us about higher forms of consciousness? Zabelka’s sound art, which she calls “Multiversal Music”, is a speculative acoustics of the future – sensual, investigative, transdisciplinary.

Her work operates at the crossroads of music, physics, biology, and technology – far beyond conventional musical aesthetics. Terms such as “molecular language microstructural sonic landscapes” or “the sound of matter” not only reflect Zabelka’s transdisciplinary ambition but also her visionary approach to sound as a medium of insight.

Austrian composer, violinist, and sound artist Mia Zabelka conceptualizes sound as a molecular language—one capable of rendering chemical, physical, and biological processes sensually perceptible through artistic practice. Her compositions operate as acoustic laboratories, in which microtonality, extended instrumental techniques—referred to as “sonic body impulses”—and electronic modulation function as tools for sonifying the otherwise imperceptible vibrational patterns of matter.

For Zabelka, sound transcends its role as a purely aesthetic medium and becomes a site of inquiry into material, biological, and sociopolitical realities. Guided by a radically exploratory ethos, she engages with the acoustic dimensions of molecular and atomic phenomena, mapping frequency domains that elude conventional musical systems. In doing so, she exposes hidden dynamics of atomic motion, molecular oscillation, and organic rhythm—processes typically confined to physical and chemical abstraction or technocratic discourse.

Her artistic research seeks to bridge these inaudible realms with embodied sonic experience, constructing what may be described as microstructural sonic landscapes. These works challenge dominant anthropocentric modes of perception by foregrounding vibrational agency beyond the human scale, thereby questioning hierarchical distinctions between subject and object, culture and nature, human and nonhuman.

Zabelka’s compositions pose critical speculative questions: How might the cognitive processes of post-human or nonhuman entities manifest sonically? What forms of knowledge emerge when the most fundamental units of life—cells, particles, molecules—are treated as carriers of intelligence or consciousness? Such inquiries situate her work within broader debates surrounding post-humanism, techno-science fiction, and the politics of perception in late-capitalist, data-driven societies.

Her sound art may thus be understood as a form of speculative acoustics—sensuous, investigative, and rigorously transdisciplinary. Operating at the nexus of music, physics, biology, and emergent technologies, Zabelka advances an artistic paradigm in which sound is not only heard, but known: a medium of epistemic and ontological insight that resists reductive instrumentalization.

Zabelka employs the term “multiversal music” to articulate this distinctive methodology, integrating science fiction, technological experimentation, and radical sonic research. She is credited with coining the concept as a framework for a transdisciplinary approach to music- making that deliberately exceeds genre boundaries and institutional silos. Describing multiversal music as “the code of the future,” Zabelka positions sound as a speculative interface through which alternative, post-human, or evolved modes of existence can be imagined and audibly enacted.

Situated at the intersection of art, science fiction, and political imagination, her practice engages phenomena such as particle oscillation, modulation, and transformation on both conceptual and auditory levels. Through extended violin techniques, real-time electronic processing, and her method of sonic body impulses, Zabelka constructs immersive environments that translate abstract chemical and physical processes into embodied experience.

In this context, multiversal music functions not merely as a stylistic label, but as a critical and sociopolitical tool—one that interrogates dominant regimes of knowledge production, challenges anthropocentric epistemologies, and proposes sound as a medium of resistance, transformation, and collective re-imagination. Music, in Zabelka’s practice, becomes a transdisciplinary epistemology: a mode of knowing capable of bridging empirical inquiry and artistic implicit knowledge, individual perception and planetary-scale processes, present conditions and speculative futures.