Silence isn’t empty. Not really. If you stand in a room designed by Sonya Roby for five minutes, you figure that out pretty fast. Silence in her world is heavy. It has texture. It weighs on your shoulders like a wet wool coat.
I remember the first time I walked into one of her installations. It wasn’t some pristine, white-walled gallery in Chelsea with free wine and cheese. It was a gutted warehouse on the south side of Chicago, a place where the smell of rust and old oil still clung to the brickwork. The air inside felt pressurized, charged with a low-end hum that you felt in your teeth before your ears even registered it as sound. That is the Sonya Roby experience. She doesn’t just put on a show; she engineers a situation. She forces you to ask where your own body ends and where the sonic landscape begins.
As a sound artist and performance creator, Sonya Roby has carved out a strange, necessary niche in the contemporary art scene. She doesn’t care about melody. Not in the way you or I know it. She cares about the architecture of noise, the messy rhythm of people moving through space, and those uncomfortable pauses between breaths.
This isn’t a standard bio. This is a deep dive into her head, her history, and why she’s shaking up modern performance art.
Also Read: Winnfred Wilford and Cathryn Sealey
Key Takeaways
- Sonya Roby is a multidisciplinary force, best known for smashing together bio-acoustic soundscapes and live performance.
- She hates the wall between audience and artist—her work often demands you participate, whether you want to or not.
- Her rig is a Franken-monster of vintage analog synths and high-tech field recordings.
- “Sonic Embodiment” is her main philosophy: the idea that sound is a physical object that hits you, shapes you, and moves you.
- Her latest work explores the grit of urban decay colliding with digital rebirth.
Who Is Sonya Roby and Why Should You Care?
You might be scrolling through Spotify asking, “Why haven’t I seen her name on the charts?” Here’s the truth: Sonya Roby isn’t trying to make you dance. She’s trying to rewire your nervous system. In a world that is absolutely drowning in digital noise, pinging notifications, and 15-second streaming clips, Roby offers something radical. She demands deep, painful, intentional listening.
Her relevance? It’s simple. She makes the invisible visible. Sound usually disappears the second it happens. It’s gone. But Roby treats sound like a sculptor treats clay. She gives it mass. Look at her career trajectory, and you see an artist who refuses to let audio just be background noise. She grabs it, stretches it until it screams, and sometimes, she breaks it on purpose.
I was talking to a curator after a particularly grueling show of hers in Berlin—a three-hour endurance piece where the dancers only moved when specific sub-bass frequencies hit. He looked exhausted. He told me, “Sonya doesn’t want you to enjoy the sound, man. She wants you to survive it.” That line stuck with me. Her work matters because it’s a punch in the gut to passive consumption. You can’t doom-scroll through a Sonya Roby performance. You have to be there, physically present, dealing with the noise.
How Did a Kid from the Tracks Become a Sound Icon?
We love to imagine artists born with a violin in hand, don’t we? It’s a nice fairy tale. But Roby’s origin story is dirtier than that. It’s tactile. Growing up, she wasn’t a band geek. She was obsessed with how things worked—specifically, heavy machinery.
She tells this story—and I’ve heard her tell it a few times, always with a weird little smile—about her childhood home. It was right next to a rail yard. Most people would hate that. The noise, the shaking walls. But Roby loved it. While other kids were sleeping, she’d lie on the floor in the dark, pressing her ear against the hardwood. She wasn’t hiding. She was listening to the trains. She learned to identify them by the vibration in the floorboards. She mapped the night schedule through her fingertips.
That wasn’t just a weird kid doing weird kid stuff. That was her education. She learned before she could even do algebra that sound travels through solid matter differently than it travels through air. That one fact—that sound is vibration you can touch—became the foundation of everything she does today.
Was There a “Lightbulb” Moment?
I think so. Roby often talks about a summer she spent in her grandfather’s garage. The guy wasn’t an artist; he was a mechanic who fixed old radios on the side. He taught her to look at a circuit board not as a jumble of wires, but as a map. A city grid of electricity.
One hot afternoon, they messed up. They crossed two wires on a shortwave radio and it let out this shrieking, rhythmic feedback loop. Most people? They’d cover their ears and kill the power. Roby didn’t flinch. She sat there, staring at the speaker, mesmerized by the mistake. She realized right then that “noise” is just organized sound we haven’t learned to like yet. That glitch, that error, became her aesthetic. She stopped trying to fix the static and started trying to play it.
What makes Her Performance Style So Different?
Ever watch a ballet and feel like the dancers are slaves to the music? They move on the beat, perfectly timed, totally controlled. In Roby’s work, she flips that hierarchy. Sound and movement are in a fistfight, and they’re both winning.
Her approach is distinct because she often uses the performers’ bodies to actually generate the soundtrack. Take her piece Resonant Bodies. I saw this live, and it was intense. The performers had contact microphones taped directly to their skin. Tape, wires, sweat. Every breath they took, every heartbeat, every time their skin brushed the floor—it was amplified and looped through massive speakers.
It creates a feedback loop of pure vulnerability. The dancer can’t fake it. If they get tired and their heart rate spikes, we hear it. If they panic, the rhythm of the track speeds up. It is the most honest performance I’ve ever seen. It strips away the acting and shows you the raw, sweating machinery of the human body.
How Does She Mix the Digital with the Dirt?
This is where Roby shows she’s a nerd at heart. We live in the iPhone era, but Roby refuses to give up on the warm, crackling chaos of analog gear. Her studio looks like a RadioShack exploded.
- Field Recordings: She doesn’t use sample packs. She goes out with a shotgun mic and records construction sites, dripping tunnels, and crowded subways.
- Modular Madness: She runs these organic sounds through complex synthesizers that look like telephone switchboards from 1955. Cables everywhere.
- Code: Then, she uses modern coding to throw it all into 3D space.
She takes the hiss of a cassette tape and mixes it with pristine digital silence. It creates a texture that feels out of time. Nostalgic, but also kind of futuristic.
Where in the World is Sonya Roby?
You are not going to find her work in a gallery that sells landscape paintings. Roby needs space. And usually, she needs darkness.
She favors industrial ruins, bunkers, and basements. That show in Berlin I mentioned? It was in a decommissioned bank vault. The acoustics were a nightmare—echoes bouncing off steel walls for days. A traditional musician would have quit. Roby treated it like a playground. She used the natural reverb of the steel to turn a whisper into a choir.
Choosing these “non-art” spaces is a calculated move. She wants you off balance. When you walk into a theater, you sit in a velvet chair and relax. When you walk into a damp basement, your guard is up. Your senses are sharp. That state of high alert? That’s exactly where she wants you.
How is She Shaping the New School?
You can’t look at the experimental sound scene right now without seeing Roby’s fingerprints all over it. She’s become a sort of godmother to a wave of young artists who are sick of the polished, auto-tuned perfection of pop culture.
She teaches them that high fidelity is boring. Emotional fidelity is what counts. I’ve seen her challenge students to record “silence” in ten different spots. They come back realizing that silence in a library feels different than silence in a graveyard. It’s about sensitivity.
Plus, she’s an open-book type of person. She champions open-source software and DIY hardware. She publishes the schematics for her custom synths online. In an art world that loves to gatekeep secrets to keep prices high, Roby’s “here, build it yourself” attitude is revolutionary.
What Are the Themes in Her Latest Projects?
If her early stuff was about the body, her new stuff is about the city. Roby has turned her mic toward the “sonic ecology” of urban decay.
We ignore the city. We put on noise-canceling headphones to block out the bus, the jackhammer, the siren. Roby wants you to take the headphones off. Her project Concrete Lungs was wild. She put vibration sensors on bridges and skyscrapers in downtown Chicago. She took the structural groans of the architecture—sounds too low for us to hear—and pitched them up.
The result was haunting. It sounded like the city was breathing. Wheezing, really. It forces you to admit that the concrete jungle is alive. It stresses, it settles, it reacts to the millions of us stomping all over it.
Why the Obsession with “Sonic Embodiment”?
She uses this term a lot: “Sonic Embodiment.” It sounds academic, but it’s actually visceral. It’s a rejection of sound as something you just think about.
For Roby, sound is physical. It’s an assault. Low frequencies can make you nauseous. High frequencies can make you anxious. Major chords can give you a rush. She uses these triggers like a painter uses red or blue. She isn’t trying to make you think; she’s trying to make your body react before your brain even knows what’s happening.
This ties back to her performance roots. A body on stage is just a mass of vibrating atoms. A speaker cone is a vibrating surface. She aligns them.
Does She Ever Work with Others?
The “solitary genius” trope is garbage, and Roby knows it. Her credits list is a mile long. She works with engineers, coders, architects, and choreographers.
I remember chatting with a lighting designer who worked on Light/Noise. He said, “Sonya doesn’t tell you what to do. She creates a problem and asks you to solve it with her.” That’s the key. Her work is too complex for one brain. You can’t be an expert in structural engineering, acoustics, dance, and coding all at once. You need a squad.
She acts as a conductor. Not of an orchestra, but of problems and solutions. She merges distinct disciplines into one messy, beautiful whole.
What’s Next for the Sound of the Future?
I asked her about the future once. She was optimistic, but cautious. She worries about the “flattening” of sound—how we consume everything through tiny phone speakers that cut off the bass and the treble.
She thinks the future is experiential. As VR and AR take over, sound is going to be the thing that anchors us. Visuals can be faked. Bad audio breaks the spell instantly. Roby sees a future where “Sound Architects” are paid just as much as building architects.
Right now, she’s messing around with bio-feedback. She wants to use the audience’s real-time brainwaves to change the sound in the room. It sounds like sci-fi, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s her.
Why You Need to See It Live
Reading this is fine. But standing in the center of her sonic vortex? That’s different. Descriptions fail because language is a straight line. Her work is a sphere. It happens all around you, all at once.
There’s a communal feeling at her shows that we don’t get in our digital lives. When a sub-bass frequency rattles the floorboards, everyone in the room feels it at the exact same second. For a moment, you aren’t strangers. You’re just a collection of bodies resonating at the same frequency.
If she comes to your city, go. Don’t look up the setlist. Don’t read the reviews. Go in blind. Let the darkness and the noise wash over you. It might be loud. It might be uncomfortable. But I promise you, it will be real.
Is Sonya Roby Underrated?
In my book? Absolutely. While the art market is chasing NFTs and viral TikTok moments, Roby is doing the heavy lifting. She’s expanding the boundaries of human perception.
She works in a medium that is hard to sell. You can’t hang a soundwave on a wall. You can’t own a performance that changes every night. That keeps her out of the mainstream, but it keeps her work pure. She isn’t creating for the market; she’s creating for the archive.
Her dedication to the craft, her technical chops, and her deep understanding of the human condition make her vital. We need artists who remind us that we are physical meat-and-bone beings in a physical world, especially as we drift further into the metaverse.
How Do We Keep Artists Like Her Going?
Supporting artists like Sonya Roby requires us to rethink value. They don’t sell products. They sell moments. They rely on grants, tickets, and residencies.
- Buy the Ticket: Seriously. Just show up.
- Support Arts Funding: Those massive installations? They don’t happen without grants.
- Listen: Practice what she preaches. Take a second to really listen to your own world.
By engaging with sound, we validate the work. We tell the world that what we hear matters just as much as what we see.
Final Thoughts
Sonya Roby is more than a sound artist. She’s an architect of experience. Through her weird tech, her respect for the analog past, and her obsession with the human body, she has built a body of work that dares us to listen harder.
In an age of constant distraction, her work demands attention. It grabs you by the collar and screams “be here now.” Whether she’s turning a bridge into a synth or amplifying a dancer’s heartbeat, Roby is hunting for the truth inside the noise.
Looking back on that night in the Berlin vault, feeling the bass settle into my marrow, I realize her work isn’t just about sound. It’s about connection. It’s about finding a common frequency in a dissonant world. And that is a legacy worth writing about.
For more information on the institutions supporting this kind of avant-garde work, you can visit the National Endowment for the Arts.
FAQs – Sonya Roby
Who is Sonya Roby and what makes her unique as a sound artist?
Sonya Roby is a multidisciplinary sound artist and performance creator known for her focus on the architecture of noise and sonic embodiment, often using vintage analog synths and field recordings to create immersive, participatory experiences that challenge passive listening.
What is the philosophy of ‘Sonic Embodiment’ that Sonya Roby advocates?
‘Sonic Embodiment’ is the idea that sound is a physical object that impacts and moves the body, aiming to trigger bodily reactions before the mind consciously processes the sound.
How did Sonya Roby’s childhood influence her art?
Growing up near a rail yard, she listened to train vibrations through the floorboards, learning that sound is vibration you can touch, which became foundational to her understanding and manipulation of sound in her work.
What sets Sonya Roby’s performance style apart from traditional dance or music performances?
Her style involves using performers’ bodies to generate and modulate sound live, creating feedback loops that reveal susceptibility, vulnerability, and raw human physicality, rather than controlling the performance precisely to music.
Why is it important to see Sonya Roby’s work live, and what should audiences expect?
Experiencing her work live immerses you in a sphere of sound that surrounds and resonates through your body, creating a communal moment of high alert and physical shared experience that cannot be fully captured through description or recordings.
