Adomas Palekas’s master’s thesis, entitled Microbiophonic Emergences, could be described as an interdisciplinary mixture of artistic reflection, philosophical speculation, and experimental sound practice. Combining ecological thought and artistic research, the text examines the relationship between sound, life, and perception. Drawing upon the Gaia hypothesis and Goethean science, the author advances a more sensitive and ethical mode of listening wherein the boundaries between the art and scientific observation are dissolved.
Overall, the presentation of the work is considerate and visually well-structured, though it significantly deviates from academic conventions. A clearly defined research question, hypothesis, or structured methodology is lacking. Instead, the text comes across as a long essay on listening, nature, and non-human agency. Its first half is dedicated to theoretical reflections on sound as a living force, while the second half introduces a series of artistic experiments and installations entitled Kwass Fermenter, Microbial Music I–III (On Bread, Compost and Haze, Aerials), Rehydration, Infection, Spectrum of Mutations: Myosin III and Kwassic Motion. According to the author, these works constitute a coherent artistic ecosystem in which microorganisms and sonic feedback interact.
More conceptually, this framing of sonification as bi-directional means that sound should not just be generated from biological data but is also to be sent back into the system and used to affect it. Conceptually, this approach seeks to transform sonification into a dialogue rather than a representation. This claim of originality, however, feels somewhat overstated: bi-directional or feedback-based sonification has been explored conceptually and practically by many artists and researchers before him, mostly within the frames of bio-art and ecological sound practices. Palekas himself mentions only one precedent when, in fact, there exists a wide range of comparable works dealing with translating biological activity into sound and then re-introducing it into the same system. His treatment of the topic is therefore limited and without deep contextual awareness, giving the impression of a rediscovery of ideas that are well conceptualized in the discipline.
The artistic independence of the thesis and a strong, personal vision are explicit. Palekas’s voice is consistent; his writing also reflects genuine curiosity and sensitivity. But it is this very independence that alienates his research from the broader academic and artistic discourse. One misses the dialogue with other practitioners or with theoretical perspectives, except for the few philosophical sources mentioned above. The limited literature review weakens the credibility of his theoretical framework and makes it difficult to situate the work within contemporary sound studies or bio-art research.
The structuring of the thesis is much closer to a philosophical narrative than to a scientific report. The chapters are more intuitively than logically connected. Because explicit methodological framing is absent, the reader has to reconstruct the logic of the experiments from poetic descriptions. For example, the sonification tests with fermentation are told in narrative terms, sometimes mentioning sensors, mappings, and feedback without providing detailed diagrams, lists of parameters, or reproducible data.
From a communicational point of view, the thesis is well-written and easy to read. Palekas’s prose is expressive and reflective; his philosophical passages are a pleasure to read. At the same time, this lyricism too often supplants analytical clarity. The experimental results remain fuzzy; the measurements are given “by ear,” not through numerical analysis, and the reader cannot tell whether the effects observed are significant or only subjective impressions.
In scope and depth, the thesis is ambitious but uneven. It tries to combine philosophy, biology, and sound art, but the practical documentation remains superficial. The experiments are deficient in calibration and control conditions, as well as in quantitative evidence. The author himself recognizes that fermentation is hardly predictable and thus difficult to reproduce. But this admission only underlines the fragility of his conclusions. Without a presentation of clear data or even replicable protocols, the whole project remains conceptual rather than empirical.
Partial accuracy and attention to detail: the author provides some information about equipment and process – for example, relative calibration among the CO₂ sensors, use of Arduino, Pure Data, but no consistent system is provided for reporting values, frequencies, and time spans. References made to appendices and videos are incomplete, and none of the referred sound recordings and codes are available. The result is that the project cannot be scientifically evaluated or reproduced.
The section on literature review reflects selectivity: In situating his thought within broader ecological and philosophical frameworks, Palekas barely engages the rich corpus of research on bio-sonification, microbial sensing, and feedback sound systems. The lack of these sources increases the effect of isolation: the thesis feels self-contained rather than in conversation with a field.
This gap between theory and documentation is where the quality of the artifact is questioned. The installations and performances he describes conceptually are incompletely and poorly documented. It is not clear if the works were created for this thesis or collated from previous projects. Without recordings, schematics, or step-by-step documentation available, one cannot evaluate any artistic or technical outcomes. Put differently, Microbiophonic Emergences is a strong artistic and philosophical statement, but it is only a partially successful academic thesis. Its conceptual strength comes from the ethical rethinking of listening, the poetic vision of sound as life, and the attempt to dissolve the hierarchy between observer and observed.
The work unfortunately lacks in methodological rigor, detailed evidence, and sufficient contextual grounding. While Palekas seeks to establish a dialogue between humans and microbes, the outcome is just speculative and remains unverified. This invention of bi-directional sonification is not really new; moreover, the thesis overlooks the numerous past projects that have already elaborated on a similar feedback relationship between sound and living systems. Overall, the work is successful as a reflective, imaginative exploration of sound and ecology but fails as a systematically researched academic document. While the work evokes curiosity and wonder, it requires far stronger methodological and contextual grounding to meet the standards of a master’s thesis.