Choomchon, or ‘Chumchon’ as it’s usually written in Thai, means the community or village; people living near and alongside one another. The Choomchon Sound strand of Sonic Minds asks how sound can articulate that village—who we are together, what we share, and how we assemble.

From shamanic ritual to rave culture, from monastic chant to football terraces, humans have long instinctively known [consciously or not] that sound has the power to bind us. It synchronises bodies, regulates breathing, and blurs the edges between “me” and “us”. Sonic Minds takes that knowledge seriously, not as a romantic idea but as a practical design starting point, to look at how we can shape sonic experiences that nurture community in contemporary settings. 

The starting point for Choomchon Sound as a concept was at Sonic Minds Camp, a small gathering in the fields that unofficially soft launched the overall project. 

Held at the Wonderfruit site in September 2024 the camp brought together a range of those that we saw as stakeholders, contributors, and participants in the project, and included meditations, lectures, rudimentary experiments and demonstrations, all based on different aspects of sound we had begun to explore with Sonic Minds, and previously in our other explorations and outputs. 

It was not a conventional academic workshop, nor a purely spiritual retreat, but a hybrid experiment: participants explored the physical power of sound—how waves shape matter, dust, and air—alongside practices of deep listening and contemplation.

The camp brought together the meeting of a Thai Forest Monk, Tan Poom, who took us on meditations in the fields, and beatmaker Japanese Shodo Shinshuu Monk, Tatsumi Akinobu who led a meditation based on contemporary electronic sounds to accompany the activity.  

We invited Dr. Mark James from the Embodied Cognitive Science Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology [OIST], whose experiments made sound’s agency visible: vibrations gathering particles into temporary forms that dissolved when the sound stopped. 

In parallel, the spiritual practices led by our two monk guests brought awareness to inner states as they shifted with collective sound. This led us to look at how sound has the intrinsic power to create shared movement even at the smallest molecular level, as well as in collective human experiences such as sports, concerts, and music festivals, and sound itself has the power to shape, build and collapse physical structures and conceptual scaffoldings. 

Thus Sonic Minds Camp had not been rigidly planned as a “community sound” inquiry, but it emerged as one; Choomchon Sound was, in that sense, discovered rather than pre-ordained as one of our specific founding directions of movement.

Going forward, Choomchon Sound’s outputs are connected by their adherence to a method and mindset to start with a place that means something to its people: a forest, a neighbourhood, a station, a market.

We aim to listen to the existing communities—human and non-human—within it; and to work with local artists, researchers, and residents to re-sonify the place: recording, composing, inviting participation, and aiming to share the results in a way that reflects the community back to itself with care, not spectacle

We began this process with Wonderfruit’s Ancestral Forest, and then the entire site and community within it, but in another context, our subject could be a housing estate, a waterfront, or a city square. In each case, Choomchon Sound seeks to create situations where people hear themselves and each other differently, noticing the bonds that already exist and perhaps forming new ones.

Sonic Minds is, after all, not only about the mind as an isolated organ, but about the mind in relation—to land, to others, to the spaces we share. Choomchon Sound is where those relations become audible.

- Nick Luscombe + James Greer