Listening with crystals

This artistic research project revisits the history and material life of Rochelle salt, a synthetic crystal first produced in seventeenth-century La Rochelle from wine lees and salt-marsh residues, and reanimates it through contemporary practice. Born under siege conditions during the French Reformation, Rochelle salt travelled from persecuted Huguenot apothecaries into colonial trade routes, later becoming one of the most powerful early piezoelectric materials used in sonar and crystal microphones. Today, it survives largely as a forgotten precursor, replaced by more stable industrial ceramics.
Through laboratory crystal-growing, archival research, and experimental sound practice, I treat Rochelle salt as an endangered conceptual world: a minor material language embedded within dominant technological histories. Growing crystals by hand using early twentieth-century methods, I engage transduction not only as a technical principle—the conversion of pressure into signal—but as an epistemic practice. The crystal becomes both sensor and teacher, revealing how landscapes, persecution, trade, and war sediment into the infrastructures of listening.
Against the homogenising tendencies of platform capitalism and algorithmic optimisation, this project foregrounds fragile, situated material knowledges. It asks what forms of innovation emerge when we attend to obsolete or minor technologies rather than maximised systems. By transposing a seventeenth-century salt into contemporary artistic and scientific contexts, Listening with Crystals demonstrates how artistic research can translate subjugated material histories into new sensory and conceptual capacities.
In doing so, the project explores how artistic research makes seeable and hearable the sedimented politics of media, offering transduction as a method for working across endangered conceptual worlds.