Victoria Pham has spent over a decade building a living archive of planetary acoustics as an archaeoacoustics and bioacoustics researcher. She’s developed access to voices most of us never consider: the hum of fungi stretching through soil, the exhalation of forests, the evolutionary lexicon of animal communication systems. Her debut album COSMOSIS takes these field recordings and extends them through technology into speculative territories, transforming wolf howls into haunting drones, moth wing friction into rhythmic pulses, and mycelial electrical currents into choral arrangements.
The album is immersive and challenging, but well worth the effort of digging into it all the way. Pham constructs environments where the familiar transforms into something unrecognizable, where ancient voices become speculative futures. COSMOSIS is exceptional in how surprisingly moving it becomes, resonating with something deeper that speaks to our place among all these voices that have shaped the world alongside us.
COSMOSIS is OUT NOW on Hospital Hill.
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What are your earliest memories of sound? What were the sounds that first made you stop and really listen as a child?
I remember two things: peacock calls and yellow butterfly wings. I grew up near a nature reserve in Sydney, and for some reason, it was full of peacocks (which are not at all indigenous to Australia). I remember going there on bike rides and walks as a child and being able to hear them from a distance and trying to find them just by hearing them “sing.”
For the butterfly wings, there is a Vietnamese children’s song called Kìa con bướm vàng (Yellow Butterfly) that I learnt as a child. It’s set to the tune of Frére Jaques, but the garden in my childhood home used to be full of yellow butterflies. They had wings the colour of yellow sherbet and would make the softest, most delicate fluttery sounds. Perhaps it was the song itself, or the butterflies that made me listen to the song’s words, but I would take the time to listen to their wing rhythms.
When did you first become aware of sound as something beyond music? Was there a specific moment when you realized you were hearing an entire acoustic world around you?
Meditation class that my primary school offered. To be frank, half the time I fell asleep, but nevertheless, the practice of making me meditate as a six-year-old child made me far more aware of what was going out there beyond any formal music lessons. I had already started music lessons and was an enthusiastic member of my school’s glockenspiel and recorder ensemble (yes, that is as horrid as it sounds), but the contrast between the atonal din of that ensemble with the quietness of those meditation classes allowed me to be hyperaware of different ways of listening.
You work in archaeoacoustics and bioacoustics research. How did you find your way into those fields? What were you searching for that led you there?
Ears first! But in reality, it’s a much funnier and sillier story. When I was 7, I had the ridiculous and ambitious aim of reading through the school’s library. I didn’t get particularly far. I started at the letter A and got to the archaeology section, and that was where I stopped. I became obsessed, almost unhealthily so, and it entirely overtook my prior obsession with dinosaurs. Perhaps it was more “human” and therefore, more tangible, and made it possible for me to consider hearing, seeing, and touching them.
Eventually, I shifted through high school and the University of Sydney generously allowed me to pursue a double degree; one at the Conservatorium to work on composing and sound engineering/design, and the other in archaeology. How hilarious that my seven-year-old self was so persistent, almost annoyingly so, to wish to synthesise things that don’t seem related at first.
So, I launched in ears first, because it was really the case. I wanted to hear backwards, and consider how could we research using our senses. I started with archaeology, looking into ways sound technology could intersect with ongoing research into the evolution of the human senses. But, for me, it was the ears, language, and maybe even music! Somehow, I ended up going further back into time, and it turned into a form of evolutionary biology.
I was asking questions about sound signalling and sound communication systems, and how they could have developed. I focused specifically on rhythm, rhythm-making, rhythm-expression, primate (specifically chimpanzee) use of rhythm to communicate, and how that might have aided in our own development of sonic communication systems. Did rhythmic proficiency have anything to do with our physical, biomechanical, and communicative evolution? Is it advantageous to be more rhythmic?
You describe your field recording library as “a living archive of our planet’s acoustics.” Over the past decade of gathering these recordings, how has your relationship with listening changed?
Over time, I’ve realised that listening is never neutral. Every sound I record or return to carries layers of personal memory, place, and context… what could have been forgotten if not for this sound memory. It’s a question of what I knew and heard then versus what I know and am listening to now.
Field recording has shifted my attention away from “capturing” sound and toward cultivating patience and presence. I listen more slowly, more generously, and with greater humility toward what I don’t control. In particular, because this archive is voices of many species and environments, I am highly aware that one day, we won’t be able to listen to a lot of these places and beings in real life anymore. And so, there’s also a heightened sensitivity to absence. Revisiting older recordings, I’m aware that some of these soundscapes no longer exist in the same way, or at all. That awareness has deepened my sense of responsibility as a listener: to witness rather than extract, and to treat sound not as raw material but as evidence of a moment in a living system.
Ultimately, my relationship with listening has become less about authorship and more about stewardship; accepting that to listen is to be in dialogue with time, memory, and change.
You’ve recorded in English woodlands, prehistoric caves in Catalonia, humid jungles, eucalyptus forests during storms on Gadigal and Darug country, and underwater in the Mediterranean. What draws you to such varied environments? Are you looking for something specific, or is the discovery part of the process?
It’s less about discovering and more about storing a mark of where I’ve been. Often, I have my Zoom H6 on me. That piece of gear has survived everything from being dropped in rivers to being left in a cave overnight by accident, but more often than not, I record on the voice memo app on my phone. The environments aren’t chosen to tick off extremes or categories; they’re places I’ve found myself moving through, sometimes deliberately on fieldwork expeditions or research, and sometimes by chance.
I’m not usually searching for a specific sound so much as staying open to what an environment wants to offer. Each place has its own rhythm, its own way of revealing itself if you spend enough time listening. Recording becomes a way of paying attention rather than extracting; responding to weather, light, fatigue (usually my own), and circumstance as much as to the soundscape itself.
Those varied environments have taught me that listening is situational and embodied. How you hear in a cave, underwater, or during a storm is shaped by vulnerability, by scale, by the limits of your own presence. The recordings end up functioning less as documents of “places” and more as traces of encounters; between me, the technology I had on hand (or in hand), and a particular moment in the world.
The album title COSMOSIS suggests both cosmos and osmosis, something vast and something permeable. How did you arrive at that title, and what does it mean to you?
Originally, the name of the album was something else. It was Earthly Futures. That has since become the name for my studio because it never felt sonic enough. In that, having the word Earthly in the original title… felt too tangible in a way that the soundworlds I wanted to produce for the record weren’t. I lingered on the word-title-sound issue for a while, trying to find a way to bring the Cosmos in line with a fantasy nature documentary.
After all, the album wants to imagine what these ecologies would sound like on another planet; what would be the same, what would be different, and could sound design in this fantasy sci-fi way still be musical? Osmosis then came in because of this fluid way of making, imagining, dreaming, and listening. What is osmosis but a process of fluidly, sometimes unconsciously, shifting through and blending ideas, knowledge, and thoughts. And so the process of listening and making aligned with this fantasy cosmos; hence, COSMOSIS.
You describe the album as “audible biomes that could belong to an Earth yet to come or a world beyond our own.” When you’re building these imagined landscapes, are you working from intuition, or do you have specific visions of what these future or alien ecologies might be?
What’s weird is that seeing was not the largest part of the process. The imagined sensation was one of feeling. I’m unsure if it can be coherently articulated in words, but I will give it a try.
The work came primarily from intuition; an embodied sense of pressure, density, temperature, and movement rather than me trying to have a vision of a specific visualised landscape. Instead of imagining what an alien ecology might look like, I focused on how it might behave sonically: how it breathes, how it reacts, how it occupies space, and how it changes over time. How close could it be to us, uncannily close? How strange could it be? Sound became a way of implying life without needing to describe its form.
That approach allowed the biomes to remain open-ended. I wasn’t interested in world-building in a literal sense, but in creating conditions for listeners to project their own internal geographies. Building from their own living archive of sound memories by drawing on mine. If these environments feel future-facing or otherworldly, it’s less because they point to a specific vision of what’s to come, and more because they sit slightly out of phase with the familiar, suggesting ecologies that are sensed before they are understood.
In that way, the album operates less as speculation and more as an audio documentary of atmospheres: a space where intuition, uncertainty, and bodily response can coexist, and where the idea of an “alien” ecology is defined by how it feels to inhabit it, even briefly.
You write about “seeking to listen beyond musical registers, hoping to bring to the surface the unheard & seemingly invisible.” What do you think conventional musical listening obscures or misses?
Well, I had my own existential crisis trying to make the album, and I think it might answer your question. It has a lot to do with the noun itself: an album. What does it mean to make an album, a record? It is a concept that all musicians and the public listening to music are aware of…we know what an album is. However, like all the terms that conventional music uses, it also comes with its own limitations. I found myself stuck before I had even begun by the confines of what an album expects itself to be.
I realised that up until this point, I had worked as a sound artist, designer, and composer – either for my own practices or in collaboration and in service of another’s (i.e. a film, work of theatre, installation) and in those ways of making, very rarely was I thinking of breaking down a sonic experience into tracks or songs. My personal sound design often involved making long-form soundworlds, the shortest in the last decade being 10 minutes long. Suddenly, making an album that had to fit comfortably under 40 minutes because of the realities of working with vinyl was a problem. There were too many biomes I wanted to explore, to many directions, too many tracks. And I had no way of conceptualising how to make a song out of sound.
But, what a gift it turned out to be! To be confounded by the physical reality of time. A single vinyl can only hold so much sound. That limitation forced me to confront what I was actually trying to listen for, and what I was willing to leave out. Conventional musical listening is often oriented toward structure, intention, and authorship: melody, rhythm, narrative, climax. Those frameworks are incredibly powerful, but they can also obscure quieter, slower, less “useful” sounds: textures without direction, processes without resolution, presences that don’t announce themselves as music.
Working within the constraints of the album format made me aware of how much listening we do in advance of hearing. How quickly we categorise something as background, ambience, or noise if it doesn’t behave like a song? By pushing against that, I wanted to create space for forms of listening that are more porous and less goal-oriented, where sound doesn’t have to perform or explain itself to be valued.
In that sense, listening beyond musical registers is about loosening expectation, mine and perhaps that of the listener. It’s about allowing the unheard and the seemingly invisible to surface, not by being made louder or more dramatic, but by being given time, attention, and a frame that asks the listener to meet the sound where it already exists.
There’s something profound in the phrase “finding communion with voices often ignored: the hum of fungi stretching through soil, the exhalation of forests.” How do you approach these non-animal, non-human voices? Do you think of them as having agency or intention?
What was particularly strange was trying to imagine how little or how much to alter these field recordings. There’s a fine line between amplification and design, especially when you’re working with sounds that already feel vast in scale. For example, both the hum of fungi and the exhalation of forests are expansive. We don’t naturally encounter these sounds (for the most part) or listen to them isolated, so having them “as-is” already feels designed. In their raw form, they don’t announce themselves in the way animal voices do, yet they’re constantly present, so it creates a sense of familiarity within the soundscapes but without being explicitly so.
When it comes to intention, I sometimes like to flip that question on its head. Yes, there may be agency embedded in these sounds, but I try not to interrogate that agency too precisely. The moment we start asking what these species mean or what they’re trying to say, we risk collapsing them into a very human framework of communication. Meaning, as we usually understand it, can be a limiting lens. Instead, I approach these voices as processes rather than messages. They are ongoing (noisy) activities that exist regardless of whether we’re listening. My role isn’t to translate them, but to create a space where they can be encountered on their own terms. If there’s communion, it comes not from understanding or interpretation, but from sustained attention and a willingness to sit with something that resists being neatly defined.
When you’re working with these natural recordings and extending them through technology, how do you maintain connection to the source while pushing it into unfamiliar terrains? What’s the balance you’re looking for?
A lot of my influences come from sound designers, rather than musicians. I remember watching all the behind-the-scenes from the making of Jurassic Park as a child, and the sound designer, Gary Rydstrom, saying that the velociraptor sound was produced using a combination of pig, dolphin, and lion recordings. Little did I know that I would end up pursuing that field. Since then, I have probably watched the 2014 Godzilla film more times than I can count just so I could listen to the sound design of the communication systems of the large “monsters.” I listened to the sound of the MUTO just this morning. More recently, the sound design team for DUNE has spoken about field recordings being taken across the desert and inside the sand itself. How do you make a sci-fi creature sound real? In this case, by recording the material of its habitat to be the foundation of its sound design, the sand itself is the foundation. All of these creatures feel real and uncanny because they are real. All of these methods of using design to augment/diminish/reimagine places, species, and voices of the natural were believable because they are rooted in reality.
The pushing of reality in the album came from drawing in sounds that actually weren’t from field recordings. There aren’t that many of them, maybe only 10% of the sonic make-up of the album; a handful of synths, an organ (which is doubled with a stretched wolf howl), percussion, trains, construction work, my voice, whistling, but they are there to provide some balance to the density of the field recordings. I have the advantage of COSMOSIS being, for the most part, a listening experience without very much visual input. It does mean that it doesn’t take too much to suspend reality. Often, amplification of what we would consider silent (i.e. lice and ants moving around in the soil) is more than enough for it to feel alien.
What was particularly strange was trying to imagine how little or how much to alter these field recordings. Very often, they needed rather little to sound alien to us. How often do we hear moth wings amplified, and suddenly, when they are, they certainly don’t resemble what our imagination thinks of as moth wings.
The moth wing percussion is such a striking image. How did you discover that moth wings could become rhythmic material? What were you hearing that made you think, “this could be percussion”?
It was a funny, accidental discovery. It all came from some time I spent in a cave. In 2018, I was doing solo archaeological fieldwork in Catalonia at the cave site of Cova del Toll. One day, I was playing sine waves in the space to pick up impulses in the karstic cave complex, and a bat came out. One single, fluffy little bat – annoyed (understandably) that I was waking it up during its slumber with so much noise. I didn’t expect it, but it spent a good chunk of time flapping its wings all around my microphone. That recording was accidentally captured, and it was also a technical failure as every time it flapped its wings, the recording clipped. It’s not like I was expecting any wind, so there was no windscreen over the MS microphone. But I went back and looked at the spectrogram that night of the recording and noticed the jagged rhythm of the clipped recording. There was rhythm to be heard in wings.
So, when it came time to find a less abrasive wing sound, I was much more prepared. No need to go searching for bats, but a quiet night with no wind, my trusty Zoom H6, and a dangling light, and eventually one curious bumbling moth later, and we have a somewhat clean recording. It did bump several times into the microphone itself, but that wasn’t used.
You describe the album as “a map of possible futures” where “sonic landscapes become speculative ecologies.” Do you think of this work as a form of ecological imagination or activism? What role can sound play in how we think about environmental futures?
If we’re talking about biodiversity, we often default to counting (visually or genetically), measuring how many individuals or species exist in a given space. But what about hearing? If a place is biodiverse, you would expect to hear that diversity: more textures, more rhythms, more overlap, more contradiction. Sound offers a qualitative way of sensing ecological complexity that numbers alone can’t fully capture.
In that sense, the album sits somewhere between ecological imagination and a quieter form of activism. It’s not didactic, and it doesn’t tell you what to think or do, but it invites listeners to inhabit futures where sound becomes a primary way of understanding environmental health. Sonic landscapes can function as speculative ecologies; spaces where we can rehearse how different futures might feel before we try to define them.
There was also something that really appealed to the nerd in me while working biome by biome. Sci-fi sound design has clearly influenced the record, but one thing that has always bothered me about a lot of science fiction is how biodiversity is portrayed. So many non-Earth planets in popular science fiction series or worlds are reduced to a single biome: the desert planet, the ocean planet, the ice planet… It’s narratively efficient, but ecologically implausible. Life doesn’t organise itself so concretely or linearly.
The planet COSMOSIS is speculating toward something messier…more livable, grotesque, beautiful, and dangerous. A place where multiple biomes collide, overlap, and compete sonically. If there’s activism in the work, it lies in expanding how we imagine environmental futures: not as simplified backdrops, but as complex, noisy, unstable systems that we are deeply entangled with. Sound, in that way, becomes a tool for re-sensitising us to the richness and fragility of the worlds we might still create.
In your research work, you’re documenting actual acoustic environments that may be changing or disappearing. Does that add urgency or weight to how you think about this archive? Is there an archival responsibility you feel?
At first, it started as a way of keeping memories for myself. It was private, and sound felt more resonant (pun intended) as a way of returning to a place. It was like journaling without words. But as the practice deepened and began to intersect with my work as a researcher, and later as a sound artist and designer, I realised that what began playfully was slowly becoming a living archive.
That shift has definitely added weight. I’m increasingly aware of how many species, environments, and even everyday technologies, like my long-standing obsession with the Sydney train system, are disappearing or being replaced. The speed of that change is alarming. There’s a real possibility that some of these sounds may simply no longer exist in the near future, and that lends the archive an urgency I didn’t anticipate at the beginning.
I do feel an archival responsibility, but not in a traditional, preservationist sense. I’m less interested in freezing these sounds in time than in keeping them active and accessible. Ideally, I’d love for the archive to become public; a shared resource that others can listen to, work with, and reinterpret. The way I think about it now is less like storing artifacts and more like tending a garden: something that needs care, attention, and openness to change to stay alive.
When you think about your listeners encountering these imagined biomes, what do you hope they experience? Are you trying to transport them, or is it more about changing how they hear the world they’re already in?
Honestly, it’s both!
On one level, I do want to transport listeners, to give them the sensation of stepping into somewhere unfamiliar, immersive, and slightly unmoored. But that transportation only really works if there’s something recognisable to hold onto. I’ve tried to leave just enough of the familiar in these imagined biomes so that people can’t fully detach from their own world. What I hope that tension creates is a moment of reflection: a quiet what if. What if imagination is all we have left? What if, at some point, an archive of voices becomes the only trace of these creatures, environments, and systems? There’s a sadness in that thought, but also a responsibility embedded in it.
Ultimately, I’m less interested in escapism than in recalibration. If the album changes how someone hears the world they’re already in. If they step outside and listen a little longer, or notice the absence of something that used to be there, then the work has done what I hoped.
And lastly, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
This is probably a combination of a few things. I really love the sound of trains moving through the underground system at Town Hall station in Sydney…especially that horrible broadband, high-frequency screech as they come to a stop. I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s always fascinated me. If I’m honest, I love most train sounds: the rhythm of the wheels, the low mechanical hum, even that slightly disgruntled sigh they give when they pull into a station.
I’m also drawn to the thumpy, opaque bass tones you get when recording with contact microphones. It’s the kind of sound you don’t so much hear as feel. There’s something intimate and embodied about them, like you’re listening from inside an object rather than observing it from the outside. And then when it’s really loud, that sound feels like it’s inside you as well.
It’s probably no surprise, then, that if you listen closely to the record, amongst all the biological and environmental sounds (that of course I also adore), you’ll hear small traces of trains, organs, and other human-made systems bleeding through the soundworlds. I think my favourite sounds tend to sit right at that intersection: where the industrial, the biological, and the bodily start to blur into one another.
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