Giga-Hertz Festival for Electronic Music and Sound Art 2025

7 pm, Cube
Premieres of the Gigahertz production award winners 2023, Lea Bertucci & Jessica Ekomane 

The American composer and performer Lea Bertucci received the Giga-Hertz Production Award in 2023 for her piece »Of Shadow and Substance«, which was inspired by the environmental disaster on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia in 2019. The French-born sound artist Jessica Ekomane was awarded for her multifaceted piece »Manifolds«, which evokes the sonic behavior of early analog synthesizer modules. 

7 pm, Cube
Award ceremony & concert of the Gigahertz Production Awards and the PopExperimental Award of 2025

The Gigahertz Production Awards, presented since 2007 with a total endowment of €15,000, and the PopExperimental Award, presented for the first time in 2022, honor electronic composition and sound art. The prizes are awarded for new pieces that have not yet been realized and will premiere at the ZKM the following year. The awards are presented in partnership with the SWR Experimentalstudio and the Popakademie Mannheim and are partially funded by the ZKM /HfG Fördergesellschaft. 

7 pm, Cube
Award ceremony & concert of the Giga-Hertz Award for Lifetime Achievement with Laetitia Sonami

This year, the Giga-Hertz Lifetime Achievement Award is awarded to Laetitia Sonami, whose visionary contributions have expanded the boundaries of sound and technology over the course of several decades. Since the late 1980s, Sonami has demonstrated a deep engagement with gesture-based performance, real-time sound synthesis, interactive systems, and embodied interfaces, establishing herself as a central figure in the development of sensor-driven musical performance and experimental electronic composition. Her work bridges the technological, the mechanical and the uncanny, exploring the fragile terrain where body, memory, language, and machine intersect.