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Lecture Performance

On June 29, 2024, we gave a lecture performance at the Forum Artistic Research in Klagenfurt (Fig. 1).
A group of people bend over cell phones lying on the floor and form a circle.

Figure 1: Klagenfurt, 29 Jun 2024 – Conclusion of the lecture performance / Photo: Daniele Pozzi.

For this article we have extended the performance’s text by two sections, which record the course of the second part of the lecture, as well as the interaction with the audience and our reflections on it, supplemented by some notes (footnotes). The podcast version is audible in Fig. 2. The individual soundscapes used are listed and are individually available at the archive www.sndscp.ch.2
  1. Detailed information about the peripher_ies project can also be found on this website (accessed 02 Nov 2025).

Figure 2: Podcast of the Lecture Performance

Becoming Soundscape
Listening, Perceiving and Acting

Soundscape collage: A water drainage (3111A, Minori Suzuki), Graz Jako­mi­ni­strasse, source calm fridge noise isolated (1071A, Elisabeth Hacker), a monk’s chanting in a Japanese monastery (6071A, Jörg Bühler), the rattling of an old mill in Promontogno/CH (3052B, bittelangsam, Andrea Zülle, Heiko Schätzle), collective breath moving together (3091B, Fiona Amundsen), inside voices (3081A, Dierdre Pearce), Cockatoos (3152A, Pia van Gelder).

CW:3 Welcome to “Becoming Sound­scape”. How do everyday sounds change, and how do we change by listening to them? Who creates and takes a stand? What emerges?

During the Corona pandemic we created over 200 soundscapes in several international online workshops. We would like to acknowledge with gratitude and thank our nine institutional partners and 56 participants.

Soundscape: Thessaloniki/GR from a rooftop with bells, siren and howling dogs (1161A & 1161B, Vasilis Ioakeimidis)
  1. The initials of each author precede their contribution

MS: Vasilis Ioakeimidis recorded this soundscape4 on April 17, 2020, on the balcony of a residential building in Thessaloniki. The harbor and the sea would have been within sight and easy walking distance—if it hadn’t been for the first lockdown of the COVID pandemic. We hear church bells. I have been to this city several times before but had never heard a bell. A siren curls around the city sounds like a liana. Twittering birds complete the sound space.
  1. MS: The term soundscape is closely linked to soundscape studies and the concept of acoustic ecology (e.g. Schafer 1977). For me, ecology raises the question: Which elements of an acoustic landscape are understood as part of a social agreement, and which are understood as separate and polluting? Mary Douglas (2003 [1966], 15) has anthropologically defined dirt, and Helmi Järviluoma et al. paraphrased it “as a matter that is out of place of something we find inappropriate in a given concept” (2009, 25). Sigmund Freud used the older expression “Dirt is matter in the wrong place” (1982 [1908], 23–30).

During the lockdown, our urban surroundings changed. Sounds that we associated with nature emerged clearly, while the soundscape of civilization became quieter and more individually recognizable. I began to ask myself a question to which I am still searching for an answer: Why do I experience such soundscapes as “completed” nature and can integrate myself into them together with the cars, sirens or church bells?5


AI: I’ve been hearing a buzzing noise from the building site for days. I can’t imagine what it is. Is it tinnitus, a hairdryer or a grinding machine? A car whizzes past, windows rattle. The parquet creaks above me.


On Friday April 17, 2020, my life changed fundamentally. At 3.33 pm, for 34 seconds, I consciously recorded a soundscape for the first time.


I’m sitting on a concrete cube between an office, a crèche and a care home. I put on the headphones. I hold the microphone at a safe distance from my body. At this moment, I become invisible and disappear. What I feel is shockingly full of life. Something creeps into me, becomes part of me without my conscious intention. I am both present and absent.

Soundscape: A courtyard with church bells...  (1021A, Andrea Iten)

Children play with cheerful bright voices. They are not allowed to go to school because of COVID.

Soundscape: …and kids playing in Basel/CH (1021A, Andrea Iten)
  1. MS: In soundscapes, sounds that do not fit into a particular idea of a landscape are often perceived very directly and physically as disturbing, and classified affectively as “noise”. By contrast, visual perception is more analytical; we scan a landscape, recognize and label disturbances and either include or exclude them.

CW: On the subject of curiosity and attention: Curiosity is deeply linked to attention, and it is an equally astonishing form of knowledge. To be curious is to feel concerned and take part in the lives of others.6

J’entends les itinérants du quartier rassemblés sur le pas de ma porte … C'est une lutte constante pour eux de trouver un lieu où dormir et de confronter la police pour ne pas se faire enfermer dans ces refuges où l’on est sûr d’attraper la COVID.
  1. CW: Curiosity is linked to consideration, which means looking/listening carefully and observing thoughtfully. Other words that come to mind are benevolence and politeness or respect; this is what I have felt throughout the sharing of these soundscapes in different contexts. The word "curious" comes from Latin curiosus, meaning “careful, diligent; inquiring eagerly, meddlesome”, and is related to cura, meaning “care”. Vinciane Despret uses this word in this sense, as does Donna Haraway, who describes it as a practice of building relationships with others to understand other forms of knowledge (Haraway 2016, 126ff).
Soundscape: Street music in Montreal/CN (2031B, Emilie Mouchous)7
  1. AI: I wonder whether the idea of somebody wanting to be heard—in its full range of meaning—arises from such situations.
Ralliés en petits groupes, ils tiennent bon pour l'instant. Ils nous crient de respecter un privilège auxquels eux n'ont pas droit: ne pas sortir et rester chez nous. Mark, dont on entend le violon au loin, est le plus solitaire.
Contribution d’Emilie Mouchous, Montreal.8
  1. English translation: “I can hear the homeless from the neighborhood gathered on my doorstep [...] It's a constant struggle for them to find somewhere to sleep and to confront the police so that they don't get locked up in these shelters where you're sure to catch COVID. Rallied in small groups, they are holding out for the time being. They shout at us to respect a privilege they are not entitled to: not to go out and stay at home. Mark, whose violin you can hear in the distance, is the loneliest.”
A rectangular wall hanging is covered with floral patterns. An excavaor is cutting down trees on an oval area. A person is standig in front of it trying to stop the machine. In the background there are various small animals such as monkeys, dogs, sheep, birds rabbits, and goats.

Figure 3: Suzanne Husky, La Noble Pastorale, 2016–2017, mix of cotton, wool and viscose (in very small quantities), 203 × 247 cm / Tapestry made on a Jacquard loom, by Magnolia Editions in 2017, © courtesy of the artist.

AI: Was gkhör ich was du nüd gkhörsch? What do I hear that you don’t hear? What happens when the strongest voices get louder and louder? In Being Singular Plural, Jean-Luc Nancy describes this as a “we” which is neither the addition nor the juxtaposition of “I”.9 How can we step aside?

Like the moment when our eyes fall back into their sockets, our jaws relax and we slip into another world? Where I am catapulted through the air into someone else’s auricles as a tiny dust particle and find a world that is wider and more comprehensive than a view of the starry sky in space? Where the sound of blood is like an ocean? Fairy tales pass by as shreds of memory. People are transformed into animals, storks or frogs.

Soundscape: A bullfrog and water (1081A, Jörg Bühler)
  1. The phrase refers to the following sentence: “But a ‘we’ is not the adding together or juxtaposition of these ‘Is’” (Nancy 2000, 65).

Dark thoughts of the violence that settler colonialism has brought to various parts of the world emerge. As­ton­ish­ment and ambivalence alternate.10
  1. AI: By consciously concentrating on listening, on taking myself out of the time continuum and recording, I risk a state of caesura. If I do not encounter the “other” through action yet am with them at the same time, I consciously decide against a state in which I know what is expected of me and how I have to fulfill my predetermined role.
DH: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”11
  1. DH: The current phrasing appears to have originated in the 1910 book Physics by Charles Riborg Mann and George Ransom Twiss (1910). The question “When a tree falls in a lonely forest, and no animal is nearby to hear it, does it make a sound? Why?” is posed along with many other questions to quiz readers on the contents of the chapter, and as such, is posed from a purely physical point of view.
Trees are reflected in the water of a rock garden. Between two blocks a small, round loudspeaker lies on a piece of rock. A cable disappears into the water.

Figure 4: Rolf Julius, It made everything silent (stone gardens). Photo by Rolf Julius (in Schulz 2002). © Estate Rolf Julius.

Sound needs a listener to become what we call “sound”, or “sonic experience”. In our project, we asked participants to find and record sounds that were meaningful to them in order to share them with the group. This simple instruction resulted in a wonderful sonic pluriverse.12 In sound we could meet in a space full of beautiful ambivalence, which enabled truly open and curious conversations (see Fig. 4).
  1. Pluriverse (see also footnote 1) is the concept of multiple worlds, each with their own forms of life and knowledge. This counters the idea of a single “universal progress/progression” of humankind along a single technological and historical trajectory. This concept is evident, for instance, in the idea of “soundscape”.

In this setting, both recording and listening emerged as performative acts, with the aims of communicating and understanding, sharing and, potentially, caring.13
  1. These acts occur within an embodied experience. Only through performance can the act be fully understood. “The standard by which aesthetic thought should be measured is consequently not the confirmation of a truth or reality but solely the evidence of a moment. Such evidence is to a certain extent unassailable, for we either see (into) something or we remain silent.” (Henke et al. 2020, 40).

In selecting and recording sounds for the soundscape we already encounter a range of technically mediated ways of listening: Some recordings manifest an outward ear, where the listener-recorder is situated in an environment, while making their own presence and positionality inaudible. This is the listening position common in soundscape studies.14
  1. This position attempts to create an "objective" representation of a sonic environment as spatial composition of sonic objects (Schafer 1977).
Soundscape: Courtyard background atmosphere with Ping-Pong and Birds (1061AB, Daniel Hug)
Soundscape; Staircase atmosphere with baroque violin and birds in the background (1121B, Sabrina Doser)

Listening to this soundscape, we already notice the beautiful impurity of sound. We hear not only a setting, an urban courtyard, but also the sound of people playing ping-pong or a violin. We then transition to another type of recording-listening, which situates the recorder in action, performing the everyday in the workplace or the kitchen. Elena Biserna’s work on walking, listening and soundmaking comes to mind.15

Soundscape: Washing machine (3022A, Ayuna Kawamoto) 

CW: Cooking, Domestic, Par­ent­ing, Child­care, Lock­down, Crack­ling, Water, Oil.

Soundscape: In the kitchen, frying eggs, children talking (3061A, Clare Fleming)
“…these sounds were unplanned recordings; however I was alert to my environment for sounds that had a particular resonance. The crackling of the frying eggs seemed to cut through the rest of the domestic kitchen space as they crackled in the oily pan…”
“I was reminded of the frying eggs when the tide began to shift and swept over the shoreline made of shells. […] both my children in the background”
Contribution from Clare Fleming, Auckland
  1. DH: The world of sound is fascinating and diverse, and, following Chion (1998), withstands the simple attribution as “sound of”. Behind the extractivist action of “capturing” sounds lies a very human motivation: to make something “presentable”, shareable, and available for further processing as a necessary step in a communicative act. But the pitfall of fetishization lurks in such uses of sound, which are cleansed of all possible “impurities” in the original location by the recording act to become components for “sound effects”. In this process their “effectiveness” is prioritized above all. And, contrary to images, there is usually no need to ask for permission or even understand the context and meaning in which the recorded sounds emerged.

DH: The sounds we just heard do not fit into categories defined by space, place, situation, or agency.16 Instead, they transport us out of the situation in favor of the sensory pleasure of reduced listening, embodying a curious, musical ear by means of the closeup miking. Noises become the voices of things, we find surprise in the familiar, we seem to perceive something essential, maybe strange, through the playful “Eigen­logik”17 of sound.18

Soundscape: A 3D printer in action, electric (2022A, Archie Reid), A fountain on a small square in Sent/CH (6082A, Max Spielmann, Andrea Iten)

MS: Can you hear this? That sound! What is it? Water is flowing through a metal tube. The metal is set into vibration. A symbiosis is created. Roman­ti­cism attributed sublimity to nature, with its timelessness and distance. If we are working on a new understanding of nature, in which change and interconnectedness are commonplace, then we must take a decisive step and say goodbye to the sublime (Fig. 5).
  1. This refers to the “listening position common in soundscape studies” mentioned above: the attempt to frame and reify “the soundscape” along geographical and musical metaphors.
  2. The German term “Eigenlogik” can be paraphrased as the intrinsic logic of an aesthetic perception (see also footnote 13).
  3. DH: The concept of a soundscape tends to reify our sonic environment as composition, fixed in time and space. But soundscapes can also be understood as an emergent quality of an auditory situation which is always in the making, as a result of sound producing activities and processes by living and non-living, human and more-than-human entities. What we call a “soundscape” and represent by means of a “soundscape recording”, thus is merely a snapshot of a transient moment in a collective performance, constituting emergent, dynamic, and fragile sonic configurations.
There is a small hut on an alpine pasture. It faces the mountains. To it’s left is a cable car station, still under construction.

Figure 5: An alpine landscape with cleared pastures and transport facilities. Motta Naluns/CH, Andrea Iten.

Maybe that’s what I think I recognize in the soundscapes.19
  1. MS: The sublime is distinct from the beautiful. It is imbued with ideas. A sublime landscape is transcendent, as we are detached from nature and yet fused with it. This detachment is recognizable in the everyday German expression “Ich gehe in die Natur”. I do not see myself as nature, otherwise I could not enter it. This dialectical separation has a fatal side. We cannot “be edible”, to use the title of a book by Andreas Weber. But—as the extreme experiences of almost being “eaten” by an animal by Val Plumwood (2012) or Nastassja Martin (2022) show—we are certainly edible. We are still a part of nature, and we need an interwoven understanding of it to escape our destructive self-relationship with sublime transcendence.

AI: Transformative moments in sound sequences can form a temporarily fluid “we”. Be it through the air, the water or vibrations from the underground. To contribute to countless possibilities of new forms of coexistence on our planet.20

A car drives past the house, a loudspeaker on wheels. I have faded out the church bells.

It becomes quiet.

MS: Quiet—but full of life.

Soundscape: Siesta dish washing, birds, music (1131A, Sebastian Gebhart)

COVID19 was associated with restrictions and existential fears, but also led to the experience of new forms of social contact. A shared aperitif in the form of a video conference with friends from all over the world, or a distanced meeting with neighbours in a park. We experienced the feeling of a new kind of global simultaneity: an immediacy of fateful connection.
  1. Immersion in the soundscape fosters an associative interconnection between its various components and our perception of the relationships between them. According to Hartmut Rosa (2019, 274ff), a resonance unfolds a relationship between humans and sounds as a diagonal axis.

The sound of the kettle appeared again and again in the workshops as a soundscape: switch on; wait; listen to the sound of the water heating up; switch off; fill a cup with hot water; drink a cup of tea. Alone and yet connected.21

Soundscape: Heating water with a kettle (1151C, Thomas Hofstetter), Inside voices (3081A, Dierdre Pearce)

AI: We have traveled through space and time together, listening and gathering around a fire. It warms us, crackles and flickers, casting shadows on our faces. An ancient gesture of pausing and listening is interrupted by a storyteller. He begins to talk about an uncertain future, one that uses smartphones instead of fire. They flicker coolly and shine brightly (Fig. 1). They let us hear sounds from places we have never seen before.

Soundscape: Home fire (3071B, Dieneke Jansen), Chimney fire crackling (4084C, Soraya Hug), Stormy Night, Wood Stove (3161B, Rachel Shearer)

AW: Gathering together in this place, which is always the same and yet so different, needs to be practiced, nurtured and cared for. It will continue indefinitely so long as there is still wood glowing in the campfire (reference: Joseph Beuys, THE HEARTH / Feuer­stätte, 1968–1974).
  1. MS: Our soundscapes from the workshops form a heterogeneous conglomerate of technical, civilizational, pastoral, urban, human, or animal sound waves generated by natural elements. The recordings are often mediocre in terms of sound technology, resulting in a slightly blurred acoustic event. Overcoming the sublime means bringing it into the present day. We are interwoven with everything, but we are not the center. Merging is not a transcendent imagination, but an immanent fact. I, we, a multiplicity in the now: the idea of a non-divisive world experience that recognizes the singular in the plural.

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