Sofia Silueta lives a life with strings attached, and not in the idiomatic sense. Growing up in both Guadalajara, Mexico, and Houston, the sounds of orchestral instruments constantly reverberated through their household. Their grandmother played guitar; their mother, the mandolin. At age 9, Silueta began taking music classes in school. They initially asked to play an enormous double bass, but when their hands proved too small, their music instructors handed them a cello instead. That practical decision sprouted a vocational calling, one that would flow alongside, and eventually dovetail, passions for the sciences, activism, and community building. Silueta now wishes to encourage other creatives to go far beyond “what you might have played when you were a kid in choir or an orchestra” and discover the edges of imagination.

“I want to inspire people to see experimental art and the avant-garde as this playground for going above and beyond the limitations that people put on you in terms of what is music, what is possible,” Silueta says. “Because it's so much more than what we were told growing up.”

Their music career started early. In high school, they began taking paid gigs, performing classical and jazz music at weddings, banquets, and other events. But while pursuing their undergraduate degree at the University of North Texas, Silueta opted to study psychology, reasoning that there wasn’t much “freedom to be more improvisational or experiment” with their cello. Silueta still played in a jazz quartet in college, but their focus was more on exploring their passion for primates. “I'd always been fascinated by animal behavior and the communication aspects,” Silueta says. “I was still in the world of acoustics and sound, but more in terms of the evolution of language, and how our own language might have these roots in other species that are our closest living relatives.”

Music took a back seat for about a decade while Silueta concentrated on the science side of their multifaceted career. After earning a master’s degree in primate behavior and ecology from Central Washington University and a doctorate in biological sciences from Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute, Silueta spent months in China and Japan recording troops of monkeys. They analyzed the resulting spectrograms (what they describe as "visualizations of the sonic frequency spectrum of a sound as it varies over time") for pitch shifts and other patterns that draw relationships between physicality and communication. Exposure to concepts like ES Morton’s motivation-structural rules, which correlate animal sounds with different motivations, inextricably shaped Silueta’s views on both science and art. “I think about those rules as like a guide, basically,” they say. “I don't think most people are considering that, when they're talking or…listening to things, but in terms of biology, these are recurring patterns that are pervasive across all sound-making organisms.”

They moved back to Houston in 2020, taking on a position as a lecturer for University of St. Thomas’s biology department, and began dabbling in music again. A nerve injury made playing the cello painful. Still, Silueta found inspiration in the communicative sounds of primates recorded during their field studies, in jam sessions with friends, and in private rooms where they practiced alone, simply for the joy of it. Peers who overheard Silueta playing encouraged them to keep going, declaring their work healing, resonant, and something special—worthy of sharing with the public. Bulwarked by the outpouring of love, Silueta applied to work with Nameless Sound, a local community-building organization emphasizing the transformative power of music. The opportunity opened a new era in their practice: They began taking a more experimental, improvisational approach, incorporating more of their bioacoustics research, even field recordings, into performances.

Videos posted to Silueta’s Instagram account chronicle their musical evolution. The artist notably incorporates elaborate costuming, staging, and pedal work into their aesthetic, gracefully playing the electric cello with chains, flowers, and tree branches in lieu of a bow. “My practice has really kind of morphed over the years…into more performance art and ritualistic performances that are very motivated by healing,” they say.

Working with Nameless Sound also pushed Silueta to invest more in another cornerstone of their creative practice: activism. They now serve as both a performer and independent curator, organizing shows that center experimental music by trans women and femme creators of color, people who are often not given equal opportunities to perform in Houston when compared to their cisgender, heterosexual, and white peers. This platform also showcases how disability doesn’t have to be a hindrance to a musical practice. Playing around their nerve injury rather than simply quitting is a means to motivate other disabled musicians to find new and novel ways to accommodate themselves and find freedom in their art.

“Through being introduced to experimental music, I realized that by using extended techniques and experimenting with pedals and using unconventional materials to create sound…I could do so much more with the sound that didn't rely on having the physical capacity for the techniques I used to rely on before,” Silueta says. 

Throughout their career, Silueta has forged close relationships with venues like Echoes, Axelrad, and Eighteen Ten Ojeman, all of which have helped put transgender women and queer femmes at the forefront of Houston's experimental music scene. Performers from New York and Berlin—both globally renowned hotbeds of the genre—have praised the city for continuing to organize underground shows and encouraging new and daring approaches to music. Silueta also received a BIPOC Arts Network & Fund Artist Award grant worth $20,000 in 2025, for “breaking the invisible barriers between our bodies inhabiting the same sonic and physical spaces to create radical environments for collaboration and community,” according to the organization’s website.

Silueta plans to use the money to continue their work as a curator and to fund a “Houston new-wave film” in collaboration with filmmaker Mitchell Collins. They hope to evangelize what makes the city so creatively fertile and amplify the underrepresented talent that inspires them most, particularly queer, femme, and transgender people of color. One of their most prominent messages is to engage and inspire audiences and music fans to start their own creative journeys. After all, the point of experimenting is to continue learning and trying until something feels right.  

“You don't have to be the world's best cellist or violinist to be an artist that is just so incredibly inspirational,” Silueta says.