CLIC members Inge Arteel, Birgit Van Puymbroeck, and Iana Nikitenko organised the international conference Sounds of a Lifetime: Exploring Life Writing in Audio Media, held at HOEK 38 on January 29–30, 2026. The event formed part of the development of the research project Broadcast Biographies: Innovations in Genre and Medium and, more broadly, of CLIC’s research strand Audio Literature and Sonic Narratives.
The conference set out to foreground the often-overlooked audio dimension of life writing, which cuts across genres, forms, and cultures. From a large number of submitted abstracts, the organisers selected fifteen outstanding contributions representing diverse approaches to audio life narrative studies. Participants joined us from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Iceland, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which made it possible to have the kind of cross-context conversation this emerging scholarly field needs.
The programme opened with a pre-conference workshop led by Marit MacArthur (University of California, Davis) and Robert M. Ochshorn (KASK School of the Arts) entitled Slow Listening: How to Study Audio Recordings as Vocal Performance. The workshop introduced slow listening methods and a highly user-friendly, state-of-the-art open-source tool Drift, designed to support the study of spoken audio recordings as performance. It also prompted a lively discussion about how these methods and tools might be integrated into participants’ research.
Three keynote speakers addressed distinct genres of audio life narratives at the conference: Julia Lajta-Novak (University of Vienna) explored spoken word poetry in her talk entitled Memoirs in Sound: ‘Reading’ Anthony Joseph’s Auto/Biographical Jazz Poetry; Matthew Rubery (Queen Mary University of London) focused on audiobooks in Audiobook Fraud from the Analog Era to AI; and Jarmila Mildorf (University of Paderborn) examined radio drama in A Life in Music: Ror Wolf’s Radio Ballad ‘Leben und Tod des Kornettisten Bix Beiderbecke aus Nord-Amerika’. Across panels, participants also presented work on audio diaries, podcasts, radio essays, features, interviews, songs, and audio archives, with sustained attention to what the audio dimension makes possible when mediating life narratives.
The organising committee plans to invite selected contributors to expand their conference papers into full chapters for an edited collection, with the aim to produce a timely reference work for scholars interested in the intersection of life narratives and audio media. Updates will be shared on the CLIC website.