Making Listening Audible

Talk by Lílian Campesato (Copenhagen, DK). Colloquium Sound & Sensory Studies.

Making Listening Audible is an ongoing research-creation project that investigates inaudible dimensions of listening experience by engaging with non-verbal forms of knowledge within music and sound art. I start from the assumption that there is a gap between what sounds and what is heard. This space, this in-between, unfolds a series of relationships, experiences, memories and affections that resist a direct description based on causal relationships and logocentric constructions. To make the inaudible audible implies discovering hidden layers of what we can feel, imagine and understand through sounds.

For this, I propose a methodology that involves two layers: the first refers to the exercise of listening to listening through the realization of a cartography of induced/suggested listening experiences. The second layer is the sharing of listening through sonification exercises, that is, by recreating listening experiences in the form of sound artworks. By sharing these initial inputs, I invite us to imagine together how different—or similar—our listening experiences can be, and to explore what happens when we attempt to make them visible, audible, and open to discussion.