All around Santiago, Chile, there are water towers known to citizens as Copas de Agua. These towers are recognised as modern industrial heritage and integral landmarks within the city’s urban landscape, contributing significantly to its cultural identity. This article presents strategies for exploring aural architecture by creating a new space defined by sound in motion within an existing architectural structure with unique morphological and acoustic characteristics through the medium of sound installation art. The project Polyphono, a multichannel sound installation located within the Copa de Agua of Quinta Bella, Chile, establishes a dialogue between three different spaces: the invisible space of the sound installation, the existing space of the water tower and the symbolic space of experience. In this process, an interior space of sound emerges within the physical space of acoustic reactions, which is experienced by the audience as aural architecture. This dynamic situation involves animating the monumentality of the water tower, transforming it through the performative action of the sound installation, thereby intensifying the historical significance of the site in physical, sensory, political and social terms. The outcomes are framed as a transitional space, from site-specific sound to aural architecture, creating an affective space for aesthetic experience.

For the Palestinian people, psychic life is just as much a site of struggle for liberation as social life. Palestinians are persistently refused psychological amplitude, characteristics easily granted to those who are never worried they might fall out of what is constituted as the category of the human. Abdaljawad Omar’s writings in English published since October 7, 2023 (as well as writings by other Palestinians, other Arabs, and those of Palestinian descent) offer means of understanding material resistance in relation to the terrain of the psyche. Omar offers distinctive accounts of mourning, loss, and ruins, as well as of how settler colonialism reorganizes experiences of time and relations between past, present, and future. The article reads Omar’s writings against other accounts of mourning and of psychic phenomena that are indebted to psychoanalysis. Omar’s analyses of Palestinians’ resistance to unfreedom and annihilation open up other ways of understanding the psychic vicissitudes of those who suffer, grieve, and struggle to exit a colonial condition characterized by the colonizer’s repeated attempts to break psychic worlds as well as erase bodily life. Understandings of psychic life that do justice to how Palestine is redrawing the world are central to the work of ‘cracking history open’.

Research on understanding the effects of language experiences upon executive control processes has turned away from static measures of language use to using more continuous measures such as proficiency, language switching and exposure. The present work utilizes language entropy, a measure that indexes the social and linguistic diversity of daily-life contexts (e.g., a classroom, cafeteria, home) of language use, to delineate the mechanisms through which contextual and social effects influence executive control. Results from existing studies utilizing entropy primarily examine bilingual contexts; however, this study focuses on multilingual university students in Ahmedabad, India. Participants (N = 56) provided entropy data from the Language History and Background Questionnaire and executive control measures from the AX-CP Task for proactive control and the n-back Task for working memory. Entropy measures proved very predictive for participants’ current language use patterns, but did not significantly predict any aspect of AX-CPT or n-back Task performance. Implications for context-specific stimulus categorization and the adaptive control hypothesis are discussed.